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Nothing can escape a black hole. General relativity is very clear on this point. Cross a black holes event horizon, and you are forever lost to the universe. Except thats not entirely true. Its true according to Einsteins theory, but general relativity is a classical model. It doesnt take into account the quantum aspects of nature. For that, youd need a quantum theory of gravity, which we dont have. But we do have some ideas about some of the effects of quantum gravity, and one of the most interesting is Hawking radiation.

One way to study quantum gravity is to look at how quantum objects might behave in curved space. Typically in quantum theory, we assume space is a fixed and flat background. Special relativity still applies, but general relativity doesnt. Basically, we just ignore gravity since its effects are so teeny. This works great for things like atoms in Earths gravity. But quantum mechanics around the event horizon of a black hole is very different.

Hawking wasnt the first to study the quantum effects of black holes, but he did show that event horizons arent immutable. If a quantum object was forever bound by a black hole, we would know with absolute certainty where the object is. But quantum systems are fuzzy, and there is always an uncertainty to their location. We could say the quantum object is probably within the black hole, there is a small chance it isnt. This means that over time objects can quantum tunnel past the event horizon and escape. This causes the black hole to lose a bit of mass, and the less mass a black hole has, the more easily quantum objects can escape.

So black holes can emit faint energy thanks to Hawking radiation. Whats interesting about this is that the effects connect black holes to thermodynamics. Since black holes emit some light, they, therefore, have a temperature. From this simple fact, physicists have developed the theory of black hole thermodynamics, which helps us understand what happens when black holes merge, among other things.

Its brilliant stuff, but the problem is we have never observed Hawking radiation. Most physicists think it does occur, but we cant prove it. And given (theoretically) how faint Hawking radiation is, and how far away even the closest black holes are, we arent likely to detect Hawking radiation in the foreseeable future. So instead, scientists look at analog systems such as water vortices or optical systems that have horizon-like properties.

A recent study in Physical Review Letters looks at optical black hole analogs, and found an interesting effect of Hawking radiation. One way to simulate black holes is to create a constrained packet of light in a non-linear optical material. The material acts as a kind of one-way gate, so photons can enter the packet in only one direction (like the one-way nature of a black hole event horizon). At the other side of the packet, photons can only leave, which is similar to a hypothetical white hole. So the optical system models a black-hole/white-hole pair.

The team used computer simulations to study what would happen when a quantum system passes through the simulated pair. They found that the pair could be used to create a quantum effect known as entanglement. When two particles are created as a quantum pair, they are entangled, which means an interaction with one particle affects the other as well. We think that when particles escape a black hole via Hawking radiation, they do so as entangled pairs. According to this latest work, the simulated black-hole/white-hole pair can be used to change the entanglement of a system passing through it. The system can even be tuned so that the entanglement is strengthened or weakened.

This work supports the idea that Hawking radiation occurs in entangled pairs, but it also shows how entanglement could be tweaked experimentally, which would be very useful to other research, such as information theory and quantum computing. The next step is to actually perform this kind of experiment in the lab. If it works as predicted, we could have a powerful new way to study quantum systems.

Reference: Agullo, Ivan, Anthony J. Brady, and Dimitrios Kranas. Quantum Aspects of Stimulated Hawking Radiation in an Optical Analog White-Black Hole Pair. Physical Review Letters 128.9 (2022): 091301.

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A new way to Confirm Hawking's Idea That Black Holes Give off Radiation - Universe Today

Quantum computers, the next generation of computing machines that promise to solve some of the worlds most pressing problems, have arrivedand Northeastern researchers are hard at work trying to improve these futuristic devices.

They include Devesh Tiwari, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who recently was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to embark on research to improve the reliability of quantum computers.

Makers of existing quantum computers, which are still largely prototypes, have claimed that their state-of-the-art devices can solve in mere minutes problems that would take traditional supercomputers thousands of years to solve. It is one of the promises of quantum computing, an emerging field which practitioners claim is verging on big transformations.

Even if it may not be apparent right now, quantum computing has already taken off, Tiwari says. When revolutionary technologies take off, it becomes apparent only in hindsight. When we look back, the last couple decades will certainly be marked as a take-off point, when lots of the theoretical promises of quantum computing started to get realized in practice.

But there is a problem. Current quantum machines, known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum-era quantum computers, or NISQ machines, are highly error-prone. As a result, when computational scientists execute their programs on NISQ machines, they receive noisy outputsthat is, inaccurate outputs, Tiwari says.

Seizing on advances in quantum bit technology, or qubits, researchers have been trying to build more powerful quantum computers. To do so, they need new techniques like the sort Tiwari hopes to develop to mitigate the side-effects of high error rates.

The funding for Tiwaris work is part of the federal agencys Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program, given to early-career faculty who are engaged in scientific leadership, education, or community outreach and whose projects involve innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology.

Tiwaris project proposal, dubbed Qurious, does just that. He and a team of researchers plan to design and develop a robust system-software ecosystem for quantum computers to help quantum programmers make meaningful interpretations of noisy and erroneous runs on quantum computers. As principal investigator of the project, Tiwari will be awarded $560,000 over a five-year period to conduct the research.

The end result, Tiwari says, is to be able to scale the software on larger, more advanced machines as they come along. He is uniquely positioned for the research because of his prior expertise in the dependability of supercomputerspredecessor devices to the emerging quantum systems. Supercomputers are currently being used to solve some of the toughest problems worldwide, like finding novel drug therapies, strengthening cybersecurity, and modeling galaxies.

Quantum computers hold the promise to solve these problems of societal importance much faster, Tiwari says.

Companies such as IBM, Google, IonQ, and Rigetti Computing have built small-scale quantum computers in recent years. Companies that have created quantum machines will have to demonstrate that their devices can achieve quantum advantage, or that the computers can outperform their classical counterparts.

I feel fortunate and humbled that the [National Science Foundation] is supporting these futuristic, high-risk high-reward ideas, Tiwari says, because this project is very forward-looking, very futuristic. Id note that this award truly belongs to all my students for the high quality of science they doI am incredibly lucky to have the privilege of advising great students in my lab; they all are remarkably innovative, creative, and persistent.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute has opened an impact lab to boost research into materials science, further bolstering the UAE's knowledge economy.

The lab, which is part of the TIIs Advanced Materials Research Centre (AMRC), will offer an ideal test bed for trialling materials, laminates and composites and aims to bring advanced materials to a stage once they are ready to transition from lab to the industry.

Tests are conducted under a range of impact-related environments state-of-the-art equipment will be used to evaluate the behaviours of the materials that help develop breakthrough solutions, TII said.

TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council, is a critical part of the UAE's efforts to diversify its economy from oil and develop a knowledge-based economy.

Ray Johnson, TIIs chief executive, said the centre aims to offer an enabling environment to researchers. Khushnum Bhandari/ The National

It is home to the Middle East's first quantum computer and to teams of researchers developing advanced materials, drones and robots for commercial use. It is also leading research in various fields, such as artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, quantum computing, cryptography, secure communication, smart devices, advanced materials and space technologies.

We are committed to offering our researchers an enabling environment to work on their collaborative and proprietary research projects and fast-track innovations to the marketplace, Ray Johnson, TIIs chief executive, said.

One of the 10 initial dedicated research centers at TII, AMRC was established to develop applied research on metals and composites.

The new lab is fully compliant with international safety regulations and is equipped with facilities to study and explore new materials to analyse their impact and blast properties, Rafael Santiago, lead researcher on the energy absorption team at AMRC, said.

With such experiments being conducted in the region for the first time, he hoped the lab could provide new solutions to pressing challenges in the real world.

Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, revealed its own quantum computer last year. Photo: TII

"We are proud to launch this lab, the outcome of months of planning and hard work, to ensure that it is capable of testing new technologies related to materials impact, as well as new manufacturing processes, Mohamed Al Teneiji, chief researcher at AMRC, said.

The lab is capable of characterising metallic, polymeric, ceramic and composite materials rapidly into prototypes with real-world applications. Its findings intend to prevent space rovers from crashing and create helmets, bumpers, tyres and car batteries that can withstand explosions.

Updated: March 03, 2022, 12:57 PM

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Abu Dhabis Technology Innovation Institute opens new lab to trial materials - The National

Some might view games as merely entertainment but for Prof. Emanuele Dalla Torre at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his team, playing games is useful for measuring the effectiveness of todays commercial quantum computers.

In a recent study published in Advanced Quantum Technologies, Dalla Torre and two of his students, Meron Sheffer and Daniel Azses, describe how they ran a collaborative, mathematical game on different technologies to evaluate 1) whether the systems demonstrated quantum mechanical properties and 2) how often the machines delivered the correct results. The team then compared the results to those generated by a classical computer.

Of the technologies tested, only the Quantinuum System Model H1-1, Powered by Honeywell, outperformed the classical results. Dalla Torre said classical computers return the correct answer only 87.5 percent of the time. The H1-1 returned the correct answer 97 percent of the time. (The team also tested the game on the now-retired System Model H0, which achieved 85 percent.)

What we see in the H1 is that the probability is not 100 percent, so its not a perfect machine, but it is still significantly above the classical threshold. Its behaving quantum mechanically, Dalla Torre said.

The mathematical game Dalla Torre and his team played requires non-local correlations. In other words, its a collaborative game in which parts of the system cant communicate to solve challenges or score points.

Its a collaborative game based on some mathematical rules, and the players score a point if they can satisfy all of them, said Dalla Torre. The key challenge is that during the game, the players cannot communicate among themselves. If they could communicate, it would be easy but they cant. Think of building something without being able to talk to each other. So, there is a limit to how much you can do. For the machines in this game, this is the classical threshold.

Quantum computers are uniquely suited to solve such problems because they follow quantum mechanical properties, which allow for non-local effects. According to quantum mechanics, something that is in one place can instantaneously affect something else that is in a different place.

What this experiment demonstrates is that there is a non-local effect, meaning that when you measure one of the qubits, you are actually affecting the others instantaneously, Dalla Torre said.

Dalla Torre attributes the performance of the Quantinuum technology to their low level of noise.

All commercial quantum computers operating today experience noise or interference from a variety of sources. Eliminating or suppressing such noise is essential to scaling the technology and achieving fault tolerant systems, a design principle that prevents errors from cascading throughout a system and corrupting circuits.

Noise in this context just means an imperfection its like a typo, Dalla Torre said So, a quantum computer does a computation and sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. The technical term is NISQ, noisy intermediate scale quantum computing. This is the general name of all the devices that we have right now. These are devices that are quantum, but they are not perfect ones. They make some mistakes.

For Dr. Brian Neyenhuis, Commercial Operations Group Leader at Quantinuum, projects such as Dalla Torres are useful benchmarks of early quantum computers and, also help demonstrate and more clearly understand the difference between classical and quantum computation.

After seeing the initial results from the H0 system, he worked with Dalla Torre to run it again on the upgraded H1 system (still only using six qubits).

We knew from a large number of standard benchmarks that the H1 system was a big step forward for us, but it was still nice to see such a clear signal that the improvements that we had made translated directly to better performance on this non-local game, Dr. Neyenhuis said.

Dalla Torre and his students completed the experiment through the Microsoft Azure Quantum platform. Being able to do this kind of work on the cloud is vital for the growth of quantum experimentation, he said. The fact that I was sitting in Israel at Bar-Ilan University and I could connect to the computers and use them using on the internet, thats something amazing.

Dalla Torre and his team would like to expand this sort of research in the future, especially as commercial quantum computers add qubits and reduce noise.

Reference: Playing Quantum Nonlocal Games with Six Noisy Qubits on the Cloud by Meron Sheffer, Daniel Azses and Emanuele G. Dalla Torre, 22 January 2022, Advanced Quantum Technologies.DOI: 10.1002/qute.202100081

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Quantinuum H1 Quantum Computer Beats Classical System at ...

The Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) and the Defense Ministrys Directorate of Research and Development (MAFAT) announced on Tuesday that they will allocate NIS 200 million (about $62.1 million) to build Israels first quantum computer.

Quantum computation ability will lay the technological foundation for an Israeli ecosystem that will lead to future developments in security, economics, technology, engineering, and science, the organizations said.

Quantum computers, unlike classic computers, are based on the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform vast amounts of computations. They can be extremely beneficial for certain tasks where they could considerably outperform even the best supercomputers.

Quantum computing significantly reduces calculation time frame and therefore constitutes a significant leap in computational capabilities, a joint statement from IIA and MAFAT said.

Israels investment in the quantum computer will be directed towards two tracks. In the first track, the Israel Innovation Authority will focus on building and developing a quantum computational infrastructure for running calculations directly or via cloud access, to optimize or improve different elements in quantum computing. The infrastructure will assess existing algorithms and will implement research and development in all layers of software and hardware, but will not include fabless installations. Technology from abroad may be partially used initially, but then the infrastructure will be integrated with Israeli-developed quantum processors and technologies.

The Defense Ministry said MAFAT will establish a national center with quantum capabilities that will be at the center of an Israeli ecosystem that will establish local capabilities. The center will collaborate with academia, industry, and the organizations that make up the National Research and Development Infrastructure (TELEM) to deal with the numerous layers in developing a quantum processor, such as hardware, control, optimization, algorithmics, and interfacing aspects. The goal is to develop a complete quantum computer

Quantum computing, on all levels, is showing signs of being an important future component of the states security and its technological superiority. Starting this process in the framework of the national program constitutes a significant step towards achieving Israeli independence in this area. said Dr. Danny Gold, head of MAFAT.

The investment in quantum computing is added to the investments of tens of millions of shekels that has been carried out so far in the technological development among companies and researchers, as part of the National Quantum Science & Technologies Program, which was launched around two years ago by the TELEM Forum (National Research and Development forum), with a budget of NIS1.25 billion (about $388 million.) This forum is made up of MAFAT, the Israel Innovation Authority, the Planning and Budgeting Committee, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, and the Finance Ministry. Implementation of this key element constitutes an important milestone in the national program.

The Israel Innovation Authority and the Defense Ministrys Directorate of Research and Development ( will continue to work to position Israel as one of the international leaders in quantum.

Quantum computing is a technology Israeli industry cannot ignore. The industry must develop knowledge and access to infrastructure in which it can develop growth engines for activities in which it will decide to lead, said Dror Bin, Israel Innovation Authority CEO.

In December, NoCamels called quantum computing one of its 7 Tech Trends Where Israel Could Make An Impact In 2022.

Prior to the announcement that Israel would build its first quantum computer, the Israeli government made a strong effort to push Israel forward in this field.

In 2019, the Knesset committed nearly $400 million to a five-year National Quantum Initiative which included $60 million towards the effort of producing a quantum computer at the time. Israels National Quantum Initiative is a joint venture between the Council for Higher Education, the Israel Innovation Authority, the Ministry of Science, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Finance. The organizations confirmed that activity in quantum computing is booming and that there is already there is a 30 to 40 percent increase in academic activity, and a jump from a small number of industries to several dozen industries, both small and large.

The Israel Innovation Authority under itsMAGNET Consortiums project, has created a consortium that includes members from the industry and academia. DubbedThe Quantum Technologies Development Consortium, the group includes companies like Quantum Machines, the creator of complete hardware and software solution for the control and operation of quantum computers, QuantumLeap, a startup specializing in quantum-as-a-service (QaaS) solutions, and Nitromia, a privacy solution that bridges and enables quantum-safe transactions on any platform (on private or public networks) to provide complete privacy for any type of data, among others.

The consortiums research is aimed at gaining improved technologies by cooperation between the researchers, which will boost the industry towards improved quantum sensors, namely, atomic clocks, quantum magnetometers and quantum gravimeters.

In October Physics Today magazinereported that Israel has become a powerhouse in quantum technologies, thanks to a supportive govermment, available capital, and world-class academic institutions, as well as other factors. The publication also reported that there has been a leap from five to 30 quantum-based companies in Israel over the last two years.

Also in December, Hebrew University Physicist, Dr. Shlomi Kotler, won Physics Worlds 2021 Breakthrough of the Year award, presented by the UK-based Institute of Physics to two research teams who advanced the understanding of quantum systems.

His team successfully quantum-mechanically entangles two drumheads that can be used as quantum sensors or nodes in a quantum network.

Physics World editors chose this years winners from nearly 600 published research articles andwrotethe winners demonstrated important work for scientific progress and/or the development of real-world applications.

Itamar Sivan, CEO and co-founder of Quantum Machines toldPhysics Todaythat he has no doubt that quantum computing will become influential and its ultimately a question of When?He also credited his companys success to the easy accessibility to funding for quantum based-firms.

Jon Medved, CEO of Israeli active crowdfunding platform OurCrowd said 2022 will see quatum computing atract continued strong inerest from investors and that global quantum VC investment will more than double from 2021s $1 billion.

In a decade from now, Quantum will be ubiquitous, and will be an order of magnitude larger in investment and revenues, he told NoCamels.

With reporting by Adam Shnider

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Israel To Invest More Than $60M To Build First Quantum ...