Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page — an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet, documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn’t compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the…
Tag: Simulators
Light-Based Quantum Computer Exceeds Fastest Classical Supercomputers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons — particles of light — has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum…
Celebrate Intel’s 4004 Microprocessor Turning 49 Today
Tim McNerney is the project leader at 4004.com, a site commemorating Intel’s original 4004 microprocessor. He’s also long-time Slashdot reader mcpublic, and shares news of a new open source adapter — plus a great moment chip history: Even though Intel debuted its groundbreaking 4004 on November 15th, 1971, 49 years ago today, in the pages of Electronics News, there is something…
Are the Best Star Wars Stories Now in Games Like ‘Star Wars: Squadrons’?
A game critic for the Los Angeles Times remembers his reaction to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “What a disappointment — if only it had been built for video game consoles.” This leads to this epiphany:
For all the deserved attention “The Mandalorian” series on Disney+ has received, the just-released game “Star Wars: Squadrons” reminds us that some of the best…
Columbia leads effort to develop a quantum simulator
Quantum technologies—simulators and computers specifically—have the potential to revolutionize the 21st century, from improved national defense systems to drug discovery to more powerful sensors and communication networks. …
Experimentally identifying effective theories in many-body systems
One goal of science is to find physical descriptions of nature by studying how basic system components interact with one another. For complex many-body systems, effective theories are frequently used to this end. They allow describing the interactions without having to observe a system on the smallest of scales. Physicists at Heidelberg University have now developed a new method that makes…
Researchers perform quantum simulation of dynamical phase transitions
Quantum simulation uses a controllable quantum system to mimic complex systems or solve intractable problems, among which the non-equilibrium problems of quantum many-body systems have attracted wide research interest. Such systems are hard to simulate using classical computers. Instead, popular quantum simulators, such as superconducting circuits, can provide insights into these problems. As considerable advances have been made in scalability, coherence…
Research team reports an important step to making optical simulators real-world devices
A group of Skoltech scientists, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Southampton (UK), developed a fully optical approach to control the couplings between polariton condensates in optical lattices. This study is an important step toward the practical application of optical polariton condensate lattices as a platform for simulating condensed matter phases. The research results were published in the journal…
What Are the Best Free Streaming Services?
An anonymous reader shares some free streaming media options: There’s over 10,000 public domain audiobooks at LibriVox.org, created by volunteers reading public domain works. (If you’ve got time, why not record yourself reading your own favorite public domain poem or novel?) And there’s also a lot of free audiobooks (and ebooks) available through Hoopla, a free “digital media” service that’s partnering…
Initialization of quantum simulators by sympathetic cooling
Simulating computationally complex many-body problems on a quantum simulator has great potential to deliver insights into physical, chemical and biological systems. Physicists had previously implemented Hamiltonian dynamics but the problem of initiating quantum simulators to a suitable quantum state remains unsolved. In a new report on Science Advances, Meghana Raghunandan and a research team at the institute for theoretical physics, QUEST…