Maths and science featured strongly in the 2018 Australian of the Year Awards. Along with physicist Michelle Simmons, maths teacher Eddie Woo and biologist Graham Farquhar were recognised.
How fast can quantum computing get? Research shows there’s a limit.
Vladvm/Shutterstock.com
A future that continues to have increasingly fast computing depends on quantum physics – but research is showing that there are limits to how fast quantum computers can go.
What’s the link between technology and consciousness?
AlexLMX/Shutterstock.com
As companies make quantum computers available through their cloud services, take a look at what it means for computing to move beyond classical mechanics and into quantum physics.
An ion-trap used for quantum computing research in the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney.
Michael Biercuk
Many scientists thought it was impossible, but one team has finally done it. They say operating their quantum computer is just like playing a game of Pacman.
Forget solid, liquid, gas. This research used advanced math to theorize about topological phases of matter. And over the years experiments with matter and cold atoms have been validating the ideas.
Preparing conducting carbon nanospheres that operate as qubits at room temperature (right) by burning naphthalene (left).
Dr Mohammad Choucair
Much of the current research in quantum computing involves work at close to absolute zero. A simple breakthough with an everyday material could see them work at more acceptable temperatures.
Spin, liquid – just add quantum.
Panom Pensawang/shutterstock.com
The information paradox is one of the great mysteries in our understanding of black holes. But has the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking found the solution?
Quantum key distribution technology can be implemented with single photons using an optical channel to encrypt any data transmission.
Supplied
As hackers get more sophisticated in their cyber crime efforts we need to look to new technology to make our systems more secure, and potentially unhackable. So how can quantum physics help?
If kitty goes in, will she really be alive and dead?
Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr
It’s a century-old debate: what is the meaning of the wave function, the central object of quantum mechanics? Is Schrödinger’s cat really dead and alive? I was recently involved in an experiment conducted…
Harnessing the quantum property of light takes security to the next level.
Boris Skoric
Decades of data security research have brought us highly reliable, standardized tools for common tasks such as digital signatures and encryption. But hackers are constantly working to crack data security…
Many different worlds but a finite number.
Flickr/fdecomite
Parallel universes – worlds where the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hit, or where Australia was colonised by the Portuguese – are a staple of science fiction. But are they real? In a radical paper published…
When you shine a torch into a dusty room, not all the photons reach their destination.
Simon Greig (xrrr)
All of the light we see around us comes in chunks of energy known as photons. As well as making up light, photons can be used to carry and process information and their quantum properties make possible…
A cat, or the superposition of an inordinate number of wave functions?
Blind Hen ⁑ Blind Höna
Whenever I see angry mobs reacting to the destruction of religious books it makes me think of Schrödinger, iPads and how we should interpret fundamentalist religious teachings in the digital era. The brilliant…
David Wineland has mentored many of the world’s leading atomic physicists.
AAP
Frenchman Serge Haroche and American David Wineland have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in what researchers in the field say is long overdue recognition. Through their ingenious laboratory methods…
No matter which way you look at it, you can’t find out everything.
The Uncertainty Principle, introduced by Heisenberg in 1927, applies to observations of the properties of the quantum world, which is typically microscopic in scale. As I explained a few months ago, it…