Winner Announced In the World’s First ‘Quantum Chess’ Tournament

Aleksander Kubica is a postdoctoral fellow at Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and Institute for Quantum Computing. And he’s also the winner of the world’s first quantum chess tournament. (It’s now available for streaming on Twitch, and begins with a clip of the late Stephen Hawking playing a 2016 game against Ant-Man star Paul Rudd.) “It’s a complicated version of…

Body Found In Canada Identified As Neo-Nazi Spam King

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally…

Scientists find a new mechanism for the stabilization of skyrmions

Tiny magnetic whirls that can occur in materials—so-called skyrmions—hold high promises for novel electronic devices or magnetic memory in which they are used as bits to store information. A fundamental prerequisite for any application is the stability of these magnetic whirls. A research team of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics of Kiel University has now demonstrated that so far…

Researchers find the origin and the maximum mass of massive black holes

Through simulations of a dying star, a team of theoretical physics researchers have found the evolutionary origin and the maximum mass of black holes which are discovered by the detection of gravitational waves. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-07-maximum-mass-massive-black-holes.html…

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…

Black holes are like a hologram

The theory of relativity describes black holes as being spherical, smooth and simple. Quantum theory describes them as being extremely complex and full of information. New research now proposes a surprising solution to this apparent duality. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/black-holes-are-like-a-hologram…

Stephen Wolfram Presents a Path to The Fundamental Theory of Physics

New submitter wattersa writes: Mathematician/Physicist Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of the technical computation program Mathematica, has announced a discovery in the area of theoretical physics. His long-form blog post discusses the emergence of physical properties of our universe from what he describes as simple, universal, computable rules. He claims the emergent properties are consistent with relativity and…

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…

10,000 times faster calculations of many-body quantum dynamics possible

How an electron behaves in an atom, or how it moves in a solid, can be predicted precisely with the equations of quantum mechanics. These theoretical calculations agree fully with the results obtained from experiments. But complex quantum systems, which contain many electrons or elementary particles—such as molecules, solids or atomic nuclei—can currently not be described exactly, even with the most…

Physicists Irreversibly Split Photons By Freezing Them In a Bose-Einstein Condensate

Physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne have succeeded in cooling photons down to a Bose-Einstein condensate, causing the light to collect in optical “valleys” from which it can no longer return. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Phys.Org reports: A light beam is usually divided by being directed onto a partially reflecting mirror:…