The Physics arXiv Blog
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Graphene quantum computers could be built with today’s technology
Is there anything graphene cannot do? The great graphene gold rush continues today with the news that graphene nanoribbon could be the key ingredient of the next generation of quantum computers. The trick with quantum computing is to use qubit-carrying particles that are easy to manipulate so that their quibits can be written and read,…
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Solar systems like ours likely to be rarer than we thought
Astronomers, to their obvious delight, have discovered some 250 planetary systems beyond our own, many of them with curious properties. In particular, the discovery of several “hot Jupiters” gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars, challenges our theories of planet formation.The thinking is that gas giants can only form far away from stars…
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The physics of skin vision
Most animals use optical systems to form images but a substantial number rely on optics-less cutaneous vision or skin vision. And while computer scientists have spent a good deal of time and effort trying to reproduce the former, how many will even have heard of skin vision? So a systematic investigation of this kind of…
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The prophetic promise of category theory
When it comes to creating the final theory of everything, physicists have an ever broadening (and bewildering) choice of mathematical tricks with which to tackle the mysteries of the universe. A couple of years ago, random matrix theory cropped up as a potential framework for a new kind of science. And a fascinating idea it…
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Spook ‘n’ spock (part 2)
More highlights from the physics arXiv this week: Quantum Algorithms Dark Stars: Dark Matter in the First Stars leads to a New Phase of Stellar Evolution Sensing Shallow Seafloor and Sediment Properties, Recent History A 3D Discrete Model of the Diaphragm and Human Trunk Terahertz Metamaterials on Free-Standing Highly-Flexible Polyimide Substrates Nonlinear Energy Harvesting Feasibility…
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Spook ‘n’ spock (part 1)
The best of the rest from the arXiv this week: Placing Direct Limits on the Mass of Earth-Bound Dark Matter Self-Organized Periodicity of Protein Clusters in Growing Bacteria Neutrino Astrophysics Using the Energy Spectrum at DAMA/LIBRA to Probe Light Dark Matter Spin-Independent Elastic WIMP Scattering and the DAMA Annual Modulation Signal Introductory Lectures on String…
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Spooky action at a distance gets spookier
Take a pair of entangled photons and perform a measurement on one of them. According to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, this measurement immediately influences the state of the second photon, no matter how far apart they are. Einstein bridled at the possibility that an instantaneous influence could take place. He called it spooky…
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Schroedinger-like PageRank wave equation could revolutionise web rankings
The PageRank algorithm that first set Google on a path to glory measures the importance of a page in the world wide web. It’s fair to say that an entire field of study has grown up around the analysis of its behaviour. That field looks set for a shake up following the publication today of…
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Creating random numbers the quantum way
The stream of high quality papers continues from the lab of Andrew Shields at Toshiba Research in Cambridge, UK. Today, his team unveils a new type of quantum random number generator and a fine looking machine it appears to be. Here’s the idea. Create a stream of single photons are emitted at random intervals that…
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Quantum communication: when 0 + 0 is not equal to 0
One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs. Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit for…