Physics
6 articles in this category
A superconductor without a press. Three layers of atoms did what 14 gigapascals couldn't
In Shenzhen, Zhuoyu Chen's team achieved superconductivity above 40 kelvin at atmospheric pressure — replacing the diamond anvil press with strain in an atomic layer.
Schrödinger's cat was a joke. Now it fixes quantum computers
In 1935, Schrödinger dreamed up a cat to mock quantum mechanics. Today that same cat — as a cat qubit — is the best candidate for fixing the greatest flaw of quantum computers: that they keep making mistakes. Amazon and Yale have just shown that errors can be corrected without a thousand spare qubits.
Photon from orbit. A microsatellite just made quantum internet practical
Jinan-1 weighs 96 kg instead of Micius' 631 kg, and the ground station weighs 100 kg instead of 13 tons - and stands on the roof of an office building in three hours. Quantum key distribution no longer requires an observatory.
23 kilograms that change everything
571 thousand bits of quantum key in a six-minute flight, with an error of 0.99%. The payload of Jinan-1 weighs 23 kg, the ground station weighs 100 kg. Four cities, routine work from 2022 to 2023.
A computer that shouldn't work
In November 2023, Andrew King, a forty-something physicist employed at Canadian D-Wave Systems, closed the door of a conference room in Burnaby behind him.
One square centimeter versus a supercomputer. Poles in the team that proved quantum superiority
The D-Wave quantum processor performed calculations that the best supercomputers could not repeat in a reasonable time. There are 63 authors in the team - two Poles from the Jagiellonian University. Their work in Science is the first practical proof that a quantum machine can solve a real physics problem beyond the reach of classical computers.