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Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women | Laura Bates

3 juin 2025 à 13:00

When social media first exploded, we missed our chance to protect women and girls. Now history is repeating itself

Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world. The trend has been dubbed an “AI frenzy”, with the components described by analysts as the “new gold or oil”.

Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries’ claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 and produced an international agreement pledging an “open”, “inclusive” and “ethical” approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it.

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny.

In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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© Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

© Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

AI pioneer announces non-profit to develop ‘honest’ artificial intelligence

Yoshua Bengio’s organisation plans to create system to act as guardrail against AI agents trying to deceive humans

An artificial intelligence pioneer has launched a non-profit dedicated to developing an “honest” AI that will spot rogue systems attempting to deceive humans.

Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the “godfathers” of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organisation committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1tn (£740bn) arms race.

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© Photograph: Andrej Ivanov/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Andrej Ivanov/AFP/Getty Images

‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!’ The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home

3 juin 2025 à 06:00

Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,” says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – “or its sequel, Eighteen Inches”, he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.

Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don’t want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it’s a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it’s worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.

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© Illustration: Kaan Illustration/The Guardian

© Illustration: Kaan Illustration/The Guardian

Reçu avant avant-hier

‘Humanity deserves better’: iPhone designer on new partnership with OpenAI

Sir Jony Ive indicates unease over impact of modern technology amid tie-up with ChatGPT developer

The designer of the iPhone has promised his next artificial intelligence-enabled device will be driven by a sense that “humanity deserves better”, after admitting feeling “responsibility” for some of the negative consequences of modern technology.

Sir Jony Ive said his new partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, would renew his optimism about technology, amid widespread concerns about the impact of smartphones and social media.

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© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Naviguez dans un océan de rétro-computing avec ce site qui propose + de 59,6 To de logiciels vintage !

Par :Korben
21 mai 2025 à 11:17

Bonne nouvelle : Le site discmaster a réouvert ses portes !

Voici un site expérimental absolument génial qui va vous permettre de naviguer et rechercher des programmes anciens, des jeux rétro, et des magazines vintage dispo sur archive.org. Imaginez pouvoir retrouver les pépites de votre jeunesse et les jeux et applications qui vous ont fait rêver à l’époque des ordinateurs 8-bits. Et bien, c’est désormais possible !

Le site en question, c’est discmaster.textfiles.com, et il recense pas moins de 968 541 579 fichiers totalisant 59,6 To de données. Autant dire que vous avez de quoi faire ! Ce qui est vraiment cool, c’est que ce site est compatible avec les navigateurs modernes mais également vintage, ce qui signifie que vous pourrez l’utiliser aussi bien sur votre ordinateur actuel que sur votre vieille machine de guerre.

Quantum computing for artists, musicians and game designers

15 mai 2025 à 15:55

Many creative industries rely on cutting-edge digital technologies, so it is not surprising that this sector could easily become an early adopter of quantum computing.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I am in conversation with James Wootton, who is chief scientific officer at Moth Quantum. Based in the UK and Switzerland, the company is developing quantum-software tools for the creative industries – focusing on artists, musicians and game developers.

Wootton joined Moth Quantum in September 2024 after working on quantum error correction at IBM. He also has long-standing interest in quantum gaming and creating tools that make quantum computing more accessible. If you enjoyed this interview with Wootton, check out this article that he wrote for Physics World in 2018: “Playing games with quantum computers“.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

 

The post Quantum computing for artists, musicians and game designers appeared first on Physics World.

RISC-V AI PC Delivers 50 TOPS, Runs Ubuntu 24.04

9 mai 2025 à 17:20

RISC-V-AI-PCUbuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions for RISC-V hardware thanks to Canonical’s strategic partnerships with companies like DeepComputing – who just announced a powerful new RISC-V AI PC running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC—apologies for the caps, it’s how it’s stylised—is built around the company’s new RISC-V Mainboard II, which is designed for use in the Framework 13″ and 14.2″ laptops. Though designed for Framework laptops, owning one isn’t a requirement. A nifty enclosure allows this mainboard to be used as a regular PC you connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The board itself […]

You're reading RISC-V AI PC Delivers 50 TOPS, Runs Ubuntu 24.04, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

Clippy, la renaissance - Le trombone légendaire revient en mode IA

Par :Korben
6 mai 2025 à 17:58

Salut les vieux cons ! Alors comme ça c’était mieux avant ? Bah ouais, c’est vrai, on n’a quand même rien fait de mieux depuis Clippy, vous savez ce petit assistant en forme de trombone qui est, je pense, la plus belle invention à ce jour de Microsoft.

Comment ça ? Rien de mieux n’aurait été inventé depuis 1997 ?

Allez, si quand même… L’IA c’est quand même une chouette invention qui permet de glander encore plus au taf et de réfléchir encore moins. Et ça c’est beau !

Quantum transducer enables optical control of a superconducting qubit

28 avril 2025 à 10:10
Optical micrograph of a quantum transducer
Quantum transducer A niobium microwave LC resonator (silver) is capacitively coupled to two hybridized lithium niobate racetrack resonators in a paperclip geometry (black) to exchange energy between the microwave and optical domains using the electro-optic effect. (Courtesy: Lončar group/Harvard SEAS)

The future of quantum communication and quantum computing technologies may well revolve around superconducting qubits and quantum circuits, which have already been shown to improve processing capabilities over classical supercomputers – even when there is noise within the system. This scenario could be one step closer with the development of a novel quantum transducer by a team headed up at the Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Realising this future will rely on systems having hundreds (or more) logical qubits (each built from multiple physical qubits). However, because superconducting qubits require ultralow operating temperatures, large-scale refrigeration is a major challenge – there is no technology available today that can provide the cooling power to realise such large-scale qubit systems.

Superconducting microwave qubits are a promising option for quantum processor nodes, but they currently require bulky microwave components. These components create a lot of heat that can easily disrupt the refrigeration systems cooling the qubits.

One way to combat this cooling conundrum is to use a modular approach, with small-scale quantum processors connected via quantum links, and each processor having its own dilution refrigerator. Superconducting qubits can be accessed using microwave photons between 3 and 8 GHz, thus the quantum links could be used to transmit microwave signals. The downside of this approach is that it would require cryogenically cooled links between each subsystem.

On the other hand, optical signals at telecoms frequency (around 200 THz) can be generated using much smaller form factor components, leading to lower thermal loads and noise, and can be transmitted via low-loss optical fibres. The transduction of information between optical and microwave frequencies is therefore key to controlling superconducting microwave qubits without the high thermal cost.

The large energy gap between microwave and optical photons makes it difficult to control microwave qubits with optical signals and requires a microwave–optical quantum transducer (MOQT). These MOQTs provide a coherent, bidirectional link between microwave and optical frequencies while preserving the quantum states of the qubit. A team led by SEAS researcher Marko Lončar has now created such a device, describing it in Nature Physics.

Electro-optic transducer controls superconducting qubits

Lončar and collaborators have developed a thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) cavity electro-optic (CEO)-based MOQT (clad with silica to aid thermal dissipation and mitigate optical losses) that converts optical frequencies into microwave frequencies with low loss. The team used the CEO-MOQT to facilitate coherent optical driving of a superconducting qubit (controlling the state of the quantum system by manipulating its energy).

The on-chip transducer system contains three resonators: a microwave LC resonator capacitively coupled to two optical resonators using the electro-optic effect. The device creates hybridized optical modes in the transducer that enables a resonance-enhanced exchange of energy between the microwave and optical modes.

The transducer uses a process known as difference frequency generation to create a new frequency output from two input frequencies. The optical modes – an optical pump in a classical red-pumping regime and an optical idler – interact to generate a microwave signal at the qubit frequency, in the form of a shaped, symmetric single microwave photon.

This microwave signal is then transmitted from the transducer to a superconducting qubit (in the same refrigerator system) using a coaxial cable. The qubit is coupled to a readout resonator that enables its state to be read by measuring the transmission of a readout pulse.

The MOQT operated with a peak conversion efficiency of 1.18% (in both microwave-to-optical and optical-to-microwave regimes), low microwave noise generation and the ability to drive Rabi oscillations in a superconducting qubit. Because of the low noise, the researchers state that stronger optical-pump fields could be used without affecting qubit performance.

Having effectively demonstrated the ability to control superconducting circuits with optical light, the researchers suggest a number of future improvements that could increase the device performance by orders of magnitude. For example, microwave and optical coupling losses could be reduced by fabricating a single-ended microwave resonator directly onto the silicon wafer instead of on silica. A flux tuneable microwave cavity could increase the optical bandwidth of the transducer. Finally, the use of improved measurement methods could improve control of the qubits and allow for more intricate gate operations between qubit nodes.

The researchers suggest this type of device could be used for networking superconductor qubits when scaling up quantum systems. The combination of this work with other research on developing optical readouts for superconducting qubit chips “provides a path towards forming all-optical interfaces with superconducting qubits…to enable large scale quantum processors,” they conclude.

The post Quantum transducer enables optical control of a superconducting qubit appeared first on Physics World.

On the path towards a quantum economy

16 avril 2025 à 16:15
The high-street bank HSBC has worked with the NQCC, hardware provider Rigetti and the Quantum Software Lab to investigate the advantages that quantum computing could offer for detecting the signs of fraud in transactional data. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Westend61 on Offset)

Rapid technical innovation in quantum computing is expected to yield an array of hardware platforms that can run increasingly sophisticated algorithms. In the real world, however, such technical advances will remain little more than a curiosity if they are not adopted by businesses and the public sector to drive positive change. As a result, one key priority for the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) has been to help companies and other organizations to gain an early understanding of the value that quantum computing can offer for improving performance and enhancing outcomes.

To meet that objective the NQCC has supported several feasibility studies that enable commercial organizations in the UK to work alongside quantum specialists to investigate specific use cases where quantum computing could have a significant impact within their industry. One prime example is a project involving the high-street bank HSBC, which has been exploring the potential of quantum technologies for spotting the signs of fraud in financial transactions. Such fraudulent activity, which affects millions of people every year, now accounts for about 40% of all criminal offences in the UK and in 2023 generated total losses of more than £2.3 bn across all sectors of the economy.

Banks like HSBC currently exploit classical machine learning to detect fraudulent transactions, but these techniques require a large computational overhead to train the models and deliver accurate results. Quantum specialists at the bank have therefore been working with the NQCC, along with hardware provider Rigetti and the Quantum Software Lab at the University of Edinburgh, to investigate the capabilities of quantum machine learning (QML) for identifying the tell-tale indicators of fraud.

“HSBC’s involvement in this project has brought transactional fraud detection into the realm of cutting-edge technology, demonstrating our commitment to pushing the boundaries of quantum-inspired solutions for near-term benefit,” comments Philip Intallura, Group Head of Quantum Technologies at HSBC. “Our philosophy is to innovate today while preparing for the quantum advantage of tomorrow.”

Another study focused on a key problem in the aviation industry that has a direct impact on fuel consumption and the amount of carbon emissions produced during a flight. In this logistical challenge, the aim was to find the optimal way to load cargo containers onto a commercial aircraft. One motivation was to maximize the amount of cargo that can be carried, the other was to balance the weight of the cargo to reduce drag and improve fuel efficiency.

“Even a small shift in the centre of gravity can have a big effect,” explains Salvatore Sinno of technology solutions company Unisys, who worked on the project along with applications engineers at the NQCC and mathematicians at the University of Newcastle. “On a Boeing 747 a displacement of just 75 cm can increase the carbon emissions on a flight of 10,000 miles by four tonnes, and also increases the fuel costs for the airline company.”

aeroplane being loaded with cargo
A hybrid quantum–classical solution has been used to optimize the configuration of air freight, which can improve fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/supakitswn)

With such a large number of possible loading combinations, classical computers cannot produce an exact solution for the optimal arrangement of cargo containers. In their project the team improved the precision of the solution by combining quantum annealing with high-performance computing, a hybrid approach that Unisys believes can offer immediate value for complex optimization problems. “We have reached the limit of what we can achieve with classical computing, and with this work we have shown the benefit of incorporating an element of quantum processing into our solution,” explains Sinno.

The HSBC project team also found that a hybrid quantum–classical solution could provide an immediate performance boost for detecting anomalous transactions. In this case, a quantum simulator running on a classical computer was used to run quantum algorithms for machine learning. “These simulators allow us to execute simple QML programmes, even though they can’t be run to the same level of complexity as we could achieve with a physical quantum processor,” explains Marco Paini, the project lead for Rigetti. “These simulations show the potential of these low-depth QML programmes for fraud detection in the near term.”

The team also simulated more complex QML approaches using a similar but smaller-scale problem, demonstrating a further improvement in performance. This outcome suggests that running deeper QML algorithms on a physical quantum processor could deliver an advantage for detecting anomalies in larger datasets, even though the hardware does not yet provide the performance needed to achieve reliable results. “This initiative not only showcases the near-term applicability of advanced fraud models, but it also equips us with the expertise to leverage QML methods as quantum computing scales,” comments Intellura.

Indeed, the results obtained so far have enabled the project partners to develop a roadmap that will guide their ongoing development work as the hardware matures. One key insight, for example, is that even a fault-tolerant quantum computer would struggle to process the huge financial datasets produced by a bank like HSBC, since a finite amount of time is needed to run the quantum calculation for each data point. “From the simulations we found that the hybrid quantum–classical solution produces more false positives than classical methods,” says Paini. “One approach we can explore would be to use the simulations to flag suspicious transactions and then run the deeper algorithms on a quantum processor to analyse the filtered results.”

This particular project also highlighted the need for agreed protocols to navigate the strict rules on data security within the banking sector. For this project the HSBC team was able to run the QML simulations on its existing computing infrastructure, avoiding the need to share sensitive financial data with external partners. In the longer term, however, banks will need reassurance that their customer information can be protected when processed using a quantum computer. Anticipating this need, the NQCC has already started to work with regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority, which is exploring some of the key considerations around privacy and data security, with that initial work feeding into international initiatives that are starting to consider the regulatory frameworks for using quantum computing within the financial sector.

For the cargo-loading project, meanwhile, Sinno says that an important learning point has been the need to formulate the problem in a way that can be tackled by the current generation of quantum computers. In practical terms that means defining constraints that reduce the complexity of the problem, but that still reflect the requirements of the real-world scenario. “Working with the applications engineers at the NQCC has helped us to understand what is possible with today’s quantum hardware, and how to make the quantum algorithms more viable for our particular problem,” he says. “Participating in these studies is a great way to learn and has allowed us to start using these emerging quantum technologies without taking a huge risk.”

Indeed, one key feature of these feasibility studies is the opportunity they offer for different project partners to learn from each other. Each project includes an end-user organization with a deep knowledge of the problem, quantum specialists who understand the capabilities and limitations of present-day solutions, and academic experts who offer an insight into emerging theoretical approaches as well as methodologies for benchmarking the results. The domain knowledge provided by the end users is particularly important, says Paini, to guide ongoing development work within the quantum sector. “If we only focused on the hardware for the next few years, we might come up with a better technical solution but it might not address the right problem,” he says. “We need to know where quantum computing will be useful, and to find that convergence we need to develop the applications alongside the algorithms and the hardware.”

Another major outcome from these projects has been the ability to make new connections and identify opportunities for future collaborations. As a national facility NQCC has played an important role in providing networking opportunities that bring diverse stakeholders together, creating a community of end users and technology providers, and supporting project partners with an expert and independent view of emerging quantum technologies. The NQCC has also helped the project teams to share their results more widely, generating positive feedback from the wider community that has already sparked new ideas and interactions.

“We have been able to network with start-up companies and larger enterprise firms, and with the NQCC we are already working with them to develop some proof-of-concept projects,” says Sinno. “Having access to that wider network will be really important as we continue to develop our expertise and capability in quantum computing.”

The post On the path towards a quantum economy appeared first on Physics World.

New entanglement approach could boost photonic quantum computing

9 avril 2025 à 15:39
Diagram showing the arrangement of the coupled waveguides, represented as circles labelled with A, C, W and E and connected by lines
Deterministic entanglement through holonomy: A system of four coupled optical waveguides (A, C, E, W), with three inter-waveguide coupling coefficients (k_A,k_E,k_W) vary in such a way to define a closed path γ. (Courtesy: Reprinted with permission from http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.080201)

Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, US have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.

Entanglement is fundamental to quantum information science, distinguishing quantum mechanics from classical theories and serving as a pivotal resource for quantum technologies. Existing methods for entangling photons often suffer from inefficiencies, however, requiring additional particles such as atoms or quantum dots and additional steps such as post-selection that eliminate all outcomes of a quantum measurement in which a desired event does not occur.

While post-selection is a common strategy for entangling non-interacting quantum particles, protocols for entangled state preparation that use post-selection are non-deterministic. This is because they rely upon making measurements, and the result of obtaining a certain state of the system after a measurement is associated with a probability, making it inevitably non-deterministic.

Non-Abelian holonomy

The new approach provides a direct and deterministic alternative. In it, the entangled photons occupy distinguishable spatial modes of optical waveguides, making entanglement more practical for real-world applications. To develop it, Georgia Tech’s Aniruddha Bhattacharya and Chandra Raman took inspiration from a 2023 experiment by physicists at Universität Rostock, Germany, that involved coupled photonic waveguides on a fused silica chip. Both works exploit a property known as non-Abelian holonomy, which is essentially a geometric effect that occurs when a quantum system evolves along a closed path in parameter space (more precisely, it is a matrix-valued generalization of a pure geometric phase).

In Bhattacharya and Raman’s approach, photons evolve in a waveguide system where their quantum states undergo a controlled transformation that leads to entanglement. The pair derive an analytical expression for the holonomic transformation matrix, showing that the entangling operation corresponds to a unitary rotation within an effective pseudo-angular momentum space. Because this process is fully unitary, it does not require measurement or external interventions, making it inherently robust.

Beyond the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect

A classic example of photon entanglement is the Hong–Ou–Mandel (HOM) effect, where two identical photons interfere at a beam splitter, leading to quantum correlations between them. The new method extends such interference effects beyond two photons, allowing deterministic entanglement of multiple photons and even higher-dimensional quantum states known as qudits (d-level systems) instead of qubits (two-level systems). This could significantly improve the efficiency of quantum information protocols.

Because state preparation and measurement are relatively straightforward in this approach, Bhattacharya and Raman say it is well-suited for quantum computing. Since the method relies on geometric principles, it naturally protects against certain types of noise, making it more robust than traditional approaches. They add that their technique could even be used to construct an almost universal set of near-deterministic entangling gates for quantum computation with light. “This innovative use of non-Abelian holonomy could shift the way we think about photonic quantum computing,” they say.

By providing a deterministic and scalable entanglement mechanism, Bhattacharya and Raman add that their method opens the door to more efficient and reliable photonic quantum technologies. The next steps will be to validate the approach experimentally and explore practical implementations in quantum communication and computation. Further in the future, it will be necessary to find ways of integrating this approach with other quantum systems, such as matter-based qubits, to enable large-scale quantum networks.

The post New entanglement approach could boost photonic quantum computing appeared first on Physics World.

Operating system for quantum networks is a first

3 avril 2025 à 15:08

Researchers in the Netherlands, Austria, and France have created what they describe as the first operating system for networking quantum computers. Called QNodeOS, the system was developed by a team led by Stephanie Wehner at Delft University of Technology. The system has been tested using several different types of quantum processor and it could help boost the accessibility of quantum computing for people without an expert knowledge of the field.

In the 1960s, the development of early operating systems such as OS/360 and UNIX  represented a major leap forward in computing. By providing a level of abstraction in its user interface, an operating system enables users to program and run applications, without having to worry about how to reconfigure the transistors in the computer processors. This advance laid the groundwork for the many of the digital technologies that have revolutionized our lives.

“If you needed to directly program the chip installed in your computer in order to use it, modern information technologies would not exist,” Wehner explains. “As such, the ability to program and run applications without needing to know what the chip even is has been key in making networks like the Internet actually useful.”

Quantum and classical

The users of nascent quantum computers would also benefit from an operating system that allows quantum (and classical) computers to be connected in networks. Not least because most people are not familiar with the intricacies of quantum information processing.

However, quantum computers are fundamentally different from their classical counterparts, and this means a host of new challenges faces those developing network operating systems.

“These include the need to execute hybrid classical–quantum programs, merging high-level classical processing (such as sending messages over a network) with quantum operations (such as executing gates or generating entanglement),” Wehner explains.

Within these hybrid programs, quantum computing resources would only be used when specifically required. Otherwise, routine computations would be offloaded to classical systems, making it significantly easier for developers to program and run their applications.

No standardized architecture

In addition, Wehner’s team considered that, unlike the transistor circuits used in classical systems, quantum operations currently lack a standardized architecture – and can be carried out using many different types of qubits.

Wehner’s team addressed these design challenges by creating a QNodeOS, which is a hybridized network operating system. It combines classical and quantum “blocks”, that provide users with a platform for performing quantum operations.

“We implemented this architecture in a software system, and demonstrated that it can work with different types of quantum hardware,” Wehner explains. The qubit-types used by the team included the electronic spin states of nitrogen–vacancy defects in diamond and the energy levels of individual trapped ions.

Multi-tasking operation

“We also showed how QNodeOS can perform advanced functions such as multi-tasking. This involved the concurrent execution of several programs at once, including compilers and scheduling algorithms.”

QNodeOS is still a long way from having the same impact as UNIX and other early operating systems. However, Wehner’s team is confident that QNodeOS will accelerate the development of future quantum networks.

“It will allow for easier software development, including the ability to develop new applications for a quantum Internet,” she says. “This could open the door to a new area of quantum computer science research.”

The research is described in Nature.

The post Operating system for quantum networks is a first appeared first on Physics World.

5G et Technologies Immersives – Nokia / Laval Virtual 2019

Dans le cas de la réalité augmentée, les utilisateurs pourront télécharger en 5G les maps 3D traitées en temps réel depuis des infrastructure Edge Computing. D’autre part, les informations associées à ces Maps 3D proviendront d’une source de données plus éloignée : le cloud.

L’article 5G et Technologies Immersives – Nokia / Laval Virtual 2019 est apparu en premier sur Réalité Augmentée - Augmented Reality.

Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak on topological qubits, the physics of bigger splashes

27 mars 2025 à 15:55

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Global Physics Summit (GPS) in Anaheim California, where I rubbed shoulders with 15,0000 fellow physicists. The best part of being there was chatting with lots of different people, and in this podcast I share two of those conversations.

First up is Chetan Nayak, who is a senior researcher at Microsoft’s Station Q quantum computing research centre here in California. In February, Nayak and colleagues claimed a breakthrough in the development of topological quantum bits (qubits) based on Majorana zero modes. In principle, such qubits could enable the development of practical quantum computers, but not all physicists were convinced, and the announcement remains controversial – despite further results presented by Nayak in a packed session at the GPS.

I caught up with Nayak after his talk and asked him about the challenges of achieving Microsoft’s goal of a superconductor-based topological qubit. That conversation is the first segment of today’s podcast.

Distinctive jumping technique

Up next, I chat with Atharva Lele about the physics of manu jumping, which is a competitive aquatic sport that originates from the Māori and Pasifika peoples of New Zealand. Jumpers are judged by the height of their splash when they enter the water, and the best competitors use a very distinctive technique.

Lele is an undergraduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, and is part of team that analysed manu techniques in a series of clever experiments that included plunging robots. He explains how to make a winning manu jump while avoiding the pain of a belly flop.

This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.

Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.

Find out more on our quantum channel.

The post Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak on topological qubits, the physics of bigger splashes appeared first on Physics World.

Quantum computers extend lead over classical machines in random circuit sampling

25 mars 2025 à 17:41

Researchers in China have unveiled a 105-qubit quantum processor that can solve in minutes a quantum computation problem that would take billions of years using the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers. The result sets a new benchmark for claims of so-called “quantum advantage”, though some previous claims have faded after classical algorithms improved.

The fundamental promise of quantum computation is that it will reduce the computational resources required to solve certain problems. More precisely, it promises to reduce the rate at which resource requirements grow as problems become more complex. Evidence that a quantum computer can solve a problem faster than a classical computer – quantum advantage – is therefore a key measure of success.

The first claim of quantum advantage came in 2019, when researchers at Google reported that their 53-qubit Sycamore processor had solved a problem known as random circuit sampling (RCS) in just 200 seconds. Xiaobu Zhu, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei who co-led the latest work, describes RCS as follows: “First, you initialize all the qubits, then you run them in single-qubit and two-qubit gates and finally you read them out,” he says. “Since this process includes every key element of quantum computing, such as initializing the gate operations and readout, unless you have really good fidelity at each step you cannot demonstrate quantum advantage.”

At the time, the Google team claimed that the best supercomputers would take 10::000 years to solve this problem. However, subsequent improvements to classical algorithms reduced this to less than 15 seconds. This pattern has continued ever since, with experimentalists pushing quantum computing forward even as information theorists make quantum advantage harder to achieve by improving techniques used to simulate quantum algorithms on classical computers.

Recent claims of quantum advantage

In October 2024, Google researchers announced that their 67-qubit Sycamore processor had solved an RCS problem that would take an estimated 3600 years for the Frontier supercomputer at the US’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to complete. In the latest work, published in Physical Review Letters, Jian-Wei Pan, Zhu and colleagues set the bar even higher. They show that their new Zuchongzhi 3.0 processor can complete in minutes an RCS calculation that they estimate would take Frontier billions of years using the best classical algorithms currently available.

To achieve this, they redesigned the readout circuit of their earlier Zuchongzhi processor to improve its efficiency, modified the structures of the qubits to increase their coherence times and increased the total number of superconducting qubits to 105. “We really upgraded every aspect and some parts of it were redesigned,” Zhu says.

Google’s latest processor, Willow, also uses 105 superconducting qubits, and in December 2024 researchers there announced that they had used it to demonstrate quantum error correction. This achievement, together with complementary advances in Rydberg atom qubits from Harvard University’s Mikhail Lukin and colleagues, was named Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2024. However, Zhu notes that Google has not yet produced any peer-reviewed research on using Willow for RCS, making it hard to compare the two systems directly.

The USTC team now plans to demonstrate quantum error correction on Zuchongzhi 3.0. This will involve using an error correction code such as the surface code to combine multiple physical qubits into a single “logical qubit” that is robust to errors.  “The requirements for error-correction readout are much more difficult than for RCS,” Zhu notes. “RCS only needs one readout, whereas error-correction needs readout many times with very short readout times…Nevertheless, RCS can be a benchmark to show we have the tools to run the surface code. I hope that, in my lab, within a few months we can demonstrate a good-quality error correction code.”

“How progress gets made”

Quantum information theorist Bill Fefferman of the University of Chicago in the US praises the USTC team’s work, describing it as “how progress gets made”. However, he offers two caveats. The first is that recent demonstrations of quantum advantage do not have efficient classical verification schemes – meaning, in effect, that classical computers cannot check the quantum computer’s work. While the USTC researchers simulated a smaller problem on both classical and quantum computers and checked that the answers matched, Fefferman doesn’t think this is sufficient. “With the current experiments, at the moment you can’t simulate it efficiently, the verification doesn’t work anymore,” he says.

The second caveat is that the rigorous hardness arguments proving that the classical computational power needed to solve an RCS problem grows exponentially with the problem’s complexity apply only to situations with no noise. This is far from the case in today’s quantum computers, and Fefferman says this loophole has been exploited in many past quantum advantage experiments.

Still, he is upbeat about the field’s prospects. “The fact that the original estimates the experimentalists gave did not match some future algorithm’s performance is not a failure: I see that as progress on all fronts,” he says. “The theorists are learning more and more about how these systems work and improving their simulation algorithms and, based on that, the experimentalists are making their systems better and better.”

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D-Wave Systems claims quantum advantage, but some physicists are not convinced

24 mars 2025 à 19:59

D-Wave Systems has used quantum annealing to do simulations of quantum magnetic phase transitions. The company claims that some of their calculations would be beyond the capabilities of the most powerful conventional (classical) computers – an achievement referred to as quantum advantage. This would mark the first time quantum computers had achieved such a feat for a practical physics problem.

However, the claim has been challenged by two independent groups of researchers in Switzerland and the US, who have published papers on the arXiv preprint server that report that similar calculations could be done using classical computers. D-Wave’s experts believe these classical results fall well short of the company’s own accomplishments, and some independent experts agree with D-Wave.

While most companies trying to build practical quantum computers are developing “universal” or “gate model” quantum systems, US-based D-Wave has principally focused on quantum annealing devices. While such systems are less programmable than gate model systems, the approach has allowed D-Wave to build machines with many more quantum bits (qubits) than any of its competitors. Whereas researchers at Google Quantum AI and researchers in China have, independently, recently unveiled 105-qubit universal quantum processors, some of D-Wave’s have more than 5000 qubits. Moreover, D-Wave’s systems are already in practical use, with hardware owned by the Japanese mobile phone company NTT Docomo being used to optimize cell tower operations. Systems are also being used for network optimization at motor companies, food producers and elsewhere.

Trevor Lanting, the chief development officer at D-Wave, explains the central principles behind  quantum-annealing computation: “You have a network of qubits with programmable couplings and weights between those devices and then you program in a certain configuration – a certain bias on all of the connections in the annealing processor,” he says. The quantum annealing algorithm places the system in a superposition of all possible states of the system. When the couplings are slowly switched off, the system settles into its most energetically favoured state – which is the desired solution.

Quantum hiking

Lanting compares this to a hiker in the mountains searching for the lowest point on a landscape: “As a classical hiker all you can really do is start going downhill until you get to a minimum, he explains; “The problem is that, because you’re not doing a global search, you could get stuck in a local valley that isn’t at the minimum elevation.” By starting out in a quantum superposition of all possible states (or locations in the mountains), however, quantum annealing is able to find the global potential minimum.

In the new work, researchers at D-Wave and elsewhere set out to show that their machines could use quantum annealing to solve practical physics problems beyond the reach of classical computers. The researchers used two different 1200-qubit processors to model magnetic quantum phase transitions. This is a similar problem to one studied in gate-model systems by researchers at Google and Harvard University in independent work announced in February.

“When water freezes into ice, you can sometimes see patterns in the ice crystal, and this is a result of the dynamics of the phase transition,” explains Andrew King, who is senior distinguished scientist at D-Wave and the lead author of a paper describing the work. “The experiments that we’re demonstrating shed light on a quantum analogue of this phenomenon taking place in a magnetic material that has been programmed into our quantum processors and a phase transition driven by a magnetic field.” Understanding such phase transitions are important in the discovery and design of new magnetic materials.

Quantum versus classical

The researchers studied multiple configurations, comprising ever-more spins arranged in ever-more complex lattice structures. The company says that its system performed the most complex simulation in minutes. They also ascertained how long it would take to do the simulations using several leading classical computation techniques, including neural network methods, and how the time to achieve a solution grew with the complexity of the problem. Based on this, they extrapolated that the most complex lattices would require almost a million years on Frontier, which is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

However, two independent groups – one at EPFL in Switzerland and one at the Flatiron Institute in the US – have posted papers on the arXiv preprint server claiming to have done some of the less complex calculations using classical computers. They argue that their results should scale simply to larger sizes; the implication being that classical computers could solve the more complicated problems addressed by D-Wave.

King has a simple response: “You don’t just need to do the easy simulations, you need to do the hard ones as well, and nobody has demonstrated that.” Lanting adds that “I see this as a healthy back and forth between quantum and classical methods, but I really think that, with these results, we’re pulling ahead of classical methods on the biggest scales we can calculate”.

Very interesting work

Frank Verstraete of the University of Cambridge is unsurprised by some scientists’ scepticism. “D-Wave have historically been the absolute champions at overselling what they did,” he says. “But now it seems they’re doing something nobody else can reproduce, and in that sense it’s very interesting.” He does note, however, that the specific problem chosen is not, in his view an interesting one from a physics perspective, and has been chosen purely to be difficult for a classical computer.

Daniel Lidar of the University of Southern California, who has previously collaborated with D-Wave on similar problems but was not involved in the current work, says “I do think this is quite the breakthrough…The ability to anneal very fast on the timescales of the coherence times of the qubits has now become possible, and that’s really a game changer here.” He concludes that “the arms race is destined to continue between quantum and classical simulations, and because, in all likelihood, these are problems that are extremely hard classically, I think the quantum win is going to become more and more indisputable.”

The D-Wave research is described in Science. The Flatiron Institute preprint is by Joseph Tindall and colleagues, and the EPFL preprint is by Linda Mauron and Giuseppe Carleo.

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