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Physicists create time reversed optical waves
Optical waves researchers at the University of Queensland and Nokia Bell Labs in the United States have revealed a new procedure to display the time-reversal of the optical wave, which could transform the disciplines of telecommunications and advanced biomedical imaging.
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Scientists Found The Perfect Spot To Build A Human Base on Mars.
Before astronauts can live on another planet, scientists will have to figure out the optimal locations for their space habitats. Aside from being barren and uninhabitable, planets like Mars are subject to harmful radiations from space that astronauts would have to be shielded from.
Scientists have now figured out a possible location that is subject to very low amounts of radiation on the Red Planet, making them a perfect spot for future astronauts to build their base of operations. According to Widely Explore.com, a team of researchers think that the lava tubes in the Hellas Planitia impact crater are one of the safest places that astronauts can take shelter in on Mars.
Hellas Planitia is a 23,464 feet deep ancient impact crater near the equator of Mars. The depth means that radiation has to traverse through a greater distance of martian atmosphere to reach the surface. Researchers explained in their pre-print paper that considerably less amount of radiation reaches the bottom of the Hellas Planitia crater.
The researchers further focused on lava tubes near Hadriacus Mons, a mountain formed due to volcanic eruptions located along the edge on Hellas Planitia carter. The researchers in their analysis found that astronauts would be exposed to 82% less radiation in the lava tubes than compared to the rest of the crater. Researchers narrowed it down to three lava tubes that could potentially be used by future Martian explorers as a base of operations.
The scientists in their paper concluded that “terrestrial lava tubes can be leveraged for radiation shielding, and accordingly that the candidate lava tubes on Mars (as well as known lava tubes on the lunar surface) can serve as natural radiation shelters and habitats for a prospective crewed mission to the plane.”
Scientists Found The Perfect Spot To Build A Human Base on Mars.
Before astronauts can live on another planet, scientists will have to figure out the optimal locations for their space habitats. Aside from being barren and uninhabitable, planets like Mars are subject to harmful radiations from space that astronauts would have to be shielded from.
Scientists have now figured out a possible location that is subject to very low amounts of radiation on the Red Planet, making them a perfect spot for future astronauts to build their base of operations. According to Widely Explore.com, a team of researchers think that the lava tubes in the Hellas Planitia impact crater are one of the safest places that astronauts can take shelter in on Mars.
Hellas Planitia is a 23,464 feet deep ancient impact crater near the equator of Mars. The depth means that radiation has to traverse through a greater distance of martian atmosphere to reach the surface. Researchers explained in their pre-print paper that considerably less amount of radiation reaches the bottom of the Hellas Planitia crater.
The researchers further focused on lava tubes near Hadriacus Mons, a mountain formed due to volcanic eruptions located along the edge on Hellas Planitia carter. The researchers in their analysis found that astronauts would be exposed to 82% less radiation in the lava tubes than compared to the rest of the crater. Researchers narrowed it down to three lava tubes that could potentially be used by future Martian explorers as a base of operations.
The scientists in their paper concluded that “terrestrial lava tubes can be leveraged for radiation shielding, and accordingly that the candidate lava tubes on Mars (as well as known lava tubes on the lunar surface) can serve as natural radiation shelters and habitats for a prospective crewed mission to the plane.”
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There's More Than Anyone Thought
Newly released data from NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen, and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested.
The surprise result has scientists delving again into results from NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter, which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.
Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for scientists to better understand how our solar system came together, NASA said in a statement. Since Jupiter was probably the first planet to form, it could have sucked up most of the gas and dust that the sun's formation left behind. How much water Jupiter soaked up then, should help scientists identify the most plausible theories to explain its formation.
And understanding Jupiter's birth would in turn help scientists understand how the planet's wind currents move and what its insides are made of. Scientists should be able to generalize findings at Jupiter to certain kinds of large exoplanets to learn how other solar systems formed.
Galileo's results were a puzzle even back in the 1990s. The spacecraft sent back data showing 10 times less water than scientists predicted, and more weirdly the amount of water appeared to increase the deeper Galileo went into Jupiter's atmosphere, according to the NASA statement. Scientists had expected that by the time it stopped transmitting data, at a depth of about 75 miles (120 kilometers), the atmosphere around it should have been well-mixed with an unchanging composition.
A ground-based infrared telescope was able to measure water concentrations at Jupiter at the same time as Galileo's plunge and showed that Galileo may have accidentally hit a dry spot, meaning water is not well-mixed deep in Jupiter's atmosphere.
Juno's first eight flybys also showed a lack of atmospheric mixing. The spacecraft's radiometer obtained data even deeper than Galileo's measurements, at 93 miles (150 km) down, and found more water at the equator than Galileo did.
Scientists are now waiting to compare Juno's equatorial measurements, with observations at the north of the planet Juno's 53-day orbit is gradually moving northward to examine more of that hemisphere with each flyby. The spacecraft's next science flyby will be on April 10.
Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn, Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, said in the NASA statement. Juno's surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet.
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QUANTUM PHYSICISTS “HOLD” INDIVIDUAL ATOMS IN PLACE FOR FIRST TIME.
In a groundbreaking experiment, quantum physicists at the University of Otago in New Zealand have figured out a way to “hold” individual atoms in place, offering up an unprecedented glimpse at the way they interact.
According to the team, the work could lead to new technology that works on the smallest atomic scale possible, potentially stuffing even more computing power into tiny microchips than is already possible today.
New Isotope Analysis Just Changed The Very Timeline of How Earth Was Born.
In the very early days of the Solar System, baby Earth took a much shorter time to form than we previously thought. According to a new analysis of the iron isotopes found in meteorites, most of Earth took just 5 million years to come together - several times shorter than current models suggest.
This revision is a significant contribution to our current understanding of planetary formation, suggesting that the mechanisms may be more varied than we think, even between planets of the same type, located in the same neighbourhood - rocky planets, such as Mars and Earth.
MIT developed a simulation to determine the best way to deflect an asteroid.
Scientists for decades have theorized how to avoid an impact and now, researchers have gone so far as to lay out a framework to help determine what method of intervention would be best to mitigate a threat.
Their decision method accounts for multiple factors including an asteroid’s mass and momentum, the amount of time scientists would have before an impending collision and its proximity to a gravitational keyhole, among others.
Paek and his team developed a simulation to help determine the best type of defense based on an asteroid’s various properties. The simulation was tested with Apophis and Bennu, asteroids in which researchers already know the locations of their gravitational keyholes, with a variety of variables.
Time seemed to be the major differentiator. For example, with Apophis, if they have at least five years before it will pass through a keyhole, there would be time to send two scouts out – one to measure the asteroid’s dimensions and another to nudge it slightly off track as a test before sending a main impactor to deflect it at a later date. If keyhole passage is set to occur between two and five years out, there may only be time for a single scout. Should the asteroid pass through a keyhole within a year or less, it could be too late to intervene.
Using the simulation tool, Paek and team may be able to set up alternative deflection methods in the future, such as launching projectiles from the Moon or using defunct satellites as kinetic impactors.
Scientists solve mystery of space bacteria on the ISS.
When you’re living in a remote, isolated environment, things like bacteria and viruses can wreak havoc in a very short period of time. The International Space Station definitely qualifies as being remote and isolated, so when a pair of bacteria species were detected in a water dispenser onboard the space station, scientists wanted to know how big of a risk they may pose.
The bacteria that were detected in the water system are similar to those known to cause infections, but only in rare cases. The fear, of course, was that the bacteria may have changed or mutated into strains that were more difficult to deal with, thereby posing a serious threat to the crew. As a new paper published in PLOS ONE explains, that’s not the case.
Upon discovering the bacteria years ago, researchers collected samples of them in the hopes of learning more about them. Learning how the bacteria differ from those on Earth can go a long way to determining just how dangerous they are, and since ISS residents are incredibly vulnerable in space, this was incredibly important.
The good news is that the bacteria species that had mysteriously popped up in the water dispenser aren’t actually any more dangerous than similar bacteria living on Earth. Obviously, the International Space Station crew would prefer that there be no bacteria in their water system, but it is a significant comfort to know that there are no mutated super bacteria chilling out in the orbiting laboratory.
Recent studies have revealed the space station to be packed with all manner of bacteria. Scientists have debated whether or not this is a bad thing, though because humans carry many bacteria on their bodies naturally, the spread of such microorganisms to the ISS is indeed inevitable.
New Species of Bacteria That Fights Climate Change Discovered by Cornell Scientists.
Cornell researchers have found a new species of soil bacteria – which they named in memory of the Cornell professor who first discovered it – that is particularly adept at breaking down organic matter, including the cancer-causing chemicals that are released when coal, gas, oil and refuse are burned.
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NASA has increasingly relied on high-tech machines like orbiters, rovers, and landers to conduct much of its research in space. However, that doesn’t mean that astronauts aren’t needed, and with a renewed interest in sending humans back to the Moon and then eventually to Mars, the space agency needs all the able-bodied space explorers it can get.
With that in mind, NASA is once again putting out the call for a new batch of astronaut applicants, and you could be one of them. The requirements are, well, pretty strict, but what else would you expect from a group that sends humans into space?
Is one of the brightest stars in the night sky losing shine?.
PARIS: Astronomers have managed to take pictures of Betelgeuse showing that the star, one of the brightest in the Milky Way, has been losing luminosity over recent months, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said on Friday.
Quantum interference observed in real-time: Extreme UV-light spectroscopy technique.
A team headed by Prof. Dr. Frank Stienkemeier and Dr. Lukas Bruder from the Institute of Physics at the University of Freiburg has succeeded in observing in real-time ultrafast quantum interferences—in other words, the oscillation patterns—of electrons which are found in the atomic shells of rare gas atoms. They managed to observe oscillations with a period of about 150 attoseconds—an attosecond is a billionth of a second. To this end, the scientists excited rare gas atoms with specially prepared laser pulses. Then they tracked the response of the atoms with a new measurement technique that enabled them to study quantum mechanical effects in atoms and molecules at extremely high time resolution. The researchers present their results in the latest edition of Nature Communications.
To fight the coronavirus, labs are printing their genome.
Advancements in genetic technology are making it easier, faster, and less expensive for public health experts to understand how the new coronavirus spreads. Time is of the essence for the people on the frontlines of this viral outbreak as the virus has already sickened more than 40,000 people and killed 910.
Researchers got an early win in January. It only took two weeks after public health officials reported the virus to the World Health Organization (WHO) for scientists to isolate the virus and figure out the full sequence of its genetic material. As soon as that sequence was public, biotechnology companies started creating synthetic copies of the virus that could be used in research.
South Africa: wild animals at risk of 'genetic pollution'.
Lions, rhinos, and cheetahs are among the wild species at risk of irreversible “genetic pollution” from breeding experiments, scientists have warned.
South African game farmers have increasingly been breeding novel trophy animals, including some freakishly-colored varieties such as the black impala, golden wildebeest or pure-white springboks.
Some hunters pay more to bag unusual trophies, but now the South African government is under fire for permitting further gene manipulation ventures that scientists say could have a damaging effect on the continent’s wildlife.
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| ? Boulder shadows may spawn short-lived pools of brine.
The 'Ghost' of an Unknown Extinct Human Has Been Found in DNA of Modern West Africans.
The gene pool of modern West Africans contains the 'ghost' of a mysterious hominin, unlike any we've detected so far. Similar to how humans and Neanderthals once mated, new research suggests this ancient long-lost species may have once mingled with our ancestors on the African continent.
The last woolly mammoths on Earth had disastrous DNA.
Dwarf woolly mammoths that lived on Siberia's Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago were plagued by genetic problems, carrying DNA that increased their risk of diabetes, developmental defects, and low s***m count, a new study finds.
These mammoths couldn't even smell flowers, the researchers reported.
"I have never been to Wrangel Island, but I am told by people who have that in the springtime, it's just basically covered in flowers," study lead researcher Vincent Lynch, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University at Buffalo in New York, told Science News. "[The mammoths] probably couldn't smell any of that."
Scientists reveal the most extensive genetic map of cancers ever made.
Perhaps more than any other, cancer is seen as a disease of genes gone wrong. So, as genetic-sequencing technology has become cheaper and faster, cancer scientists are using it to check which changes to genes cause tumors to spread.
Water on Mars? Boulder shadows may spawn short-lived pools of brine.
Many tiny patches of the ground on modern Mars may be capable of supporting life as we know it if only very briefly, a new study suggests.
Water ice is abundant on and near the Martian surface, but conditions have to be just right for this stuff to give rise to liquid water. That's because the Red Planet's atmosphere is quite thin — just 1% as dense as Earth's air at sea level — so ice tends to sublimate or turn directly into v***r when temperatures rise sufficiently. (Specifically, the ice ev***rates before temperatures rise enough to hit water's melting point.)
The study identifies a microenvironment that could host those just-right conditions: the areas directly behind certain boulders in midlatitude regions of Mars that lie in the rocks' shadows continuously during the winter months.
US scientists discover the closest-known newborn massive plane.
Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have discovered the presence of a new “baby giant planet” that is cosmically closer to Earth than any other planet of such a young age.
A newborn massive planet, dubbed 2MASS 1155-7919 b, was discovered by a team of researchers from RIT in Rochester, New York, according to a February 7 publication in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, scientists were able to locate the presence of the newborn massive planet about 330 light-years from our own solar system.
"The dim, cool object we found is very young and only 10 times the mass of Jupiter, which means we are likely looking at an infant planet, perhaps still in the midst of formation," said Annie Dickson-Vandervelde, the research’s lead author and a Ph.D. student, in a release from RIT.
The baby giant planet, which is located in the Epsilon Chamaeleontis Association, is said to orbit a 5 million-year-old star at a distance that is about 600 times that at which the Earth orbits the sun.
“Though lots of other planets have been discovered through the Kepler mission and other missions like it, almost all of those are ‘old’ planets. This is also only the fourth or fifth example of a giant planet so far from its ‘parent’ star, and theorists are struggling to explain how they formed or ended up there.”
Though scientists have little information on how such infant planets can end up so far away from their so-called “parent” stars, the team is confident that follow-up research using “imaging and spectroscopy” will provide answers about the story behind similar planets’ wide orbits.
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Coronavirus: China wildlife trade ban ‘should be permanent’.
BEIJING-Campaigners have urged China to apply a permanent ban on the wildlife trade following the coronavirus outbreak.
Markets selling live animals are considered a potential source of diseases that are new to humans.
There has been speculation just such a market in Wuhan could have been the starting point for the outbreak.
China put a temporary ban on the trade in wildlife as one measure to control the spread of coronavirus, but conservationists say it’s not enough.
They argue that, in addition to protecting human health, a permanent ban would be a vital step in the effort to end the illegal trading of wildlife.
Campaigners say that China’s demand for wildlife products, which find uses in traditional medicine, or as exotic foods, is driving a global trade in endangered species.
More than 70% of emerging infections in humans are estimated to have come from animals, particularly wild animals.
Experts with the World Health Organization (WHO) say there’s a high likelihood the new coronavirus came from bats. But it might have made the jump to a currently unknown animal group before humans could be infected.
Two critical software defects plagued Starliner test flight.
After failing to rendezvous with the International Space Station as planned during Starliner’s first orbital flight test in December last year, an independent review carried out to determine what went wrong has found, “two critical software defects” that were not detected ahead of flight despite multiple safeguards, says a statement by the agency, one of which could have had serious connotations for the spaceship during reentry.
Following Starliner’s troubled Orbital Flight Test (OFT) mission late last year, a joint investigation team consisting of NASA and Boeing officials was established in January tasked with examining the primary issues that occurred during the test flight.
At the time of the incident it was revealed by mission officials that problems with Starliner's onboard timer was behind the capsule consuming more fuel than anticipated, thus preventing Starliner from docking with the space station.
Although engineers regained control of the situation and put the spacecraft into a safe orbit, a further review of other critical components led engineers to uncover a “valve mapping software issue,” within the Service Module (SM) Disposal Sequence said the agency in a teleconference on 7 February.
The service module contains the spacecraft's support systems and is supposed to detach prior to re-entry. Had the problem not been caught and fixed via a software patch before the spacecraft returned to Earth, the cylindrical service module’s thrusters could have fired in the wrong sequence, sending it back into the crew module and possibly triggering a problematic collision of the two components.
"The thrusters' uneven firing would cause the service module, which is a piece of a cylinder, to come away from the crew module and recontact, or bump back into it," Jim Chilton, senior vice president for Boeing Space and Launch, said during the teleconference, adding that "bad things" can happen as a result of that eventuality.
"While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure," said Paul Hill, a former flight director and member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.
“While both errors could have led to risk of spacecraft loss, the actions of the NASA-Boeing team were able to correct the issues and return the Starliner spacecraft safely to Earth,” says the statement by NASA.
In addition to the two software issues, a poor communications link which impeded the Flight Control team’s ability to command and control the vehicle also contributed to the problems Starliner faced on the test flight.
The investigative review team is still working to determine the exact cause of this interference, but it appears to be associated with cell phone towers, John Mulholland, vice president and program manager of Boeing's Starliner program, said during the teleconference.
This latest failure from Boeing, which is still reeling from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max aircraft, has called into question the company’s safety procedures, and as such, the safety panel has recommended several reviews of the aerospace giant. "The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," Hill said.
“We want to understand what the culture is at Boeing, that may have led to that,” said Douglas Loverro, a senior NASA official, adding that multiple errors also pointed to "insufficient" oversight by his agency.
NASA is reluctant to discuss the ultimate future of Starliner, but said only after these assessments, will NASA determine whether the spacecraft will conduct a second, uncrewed flight test into orbit before astronauts fly on board.
"Given the potential for systemic issues at Boeing, I would also note that NASA has decided to proceed with an organisational safety assessment with Boeing as they previously conducted with SpaceX," says chair of the safety panel, Patricia Sanders.
Stephen Hawking’s Quantum Black Hole Hypothesis Supported by Gravitational Wave Echoes.
Echoes in gravitational wave signals suggest that the event horizon of a black hole may be more complicated than scientists currently think.
Research from the University of Waterloo reports the first tentative detection of these echoes, caused by a microscopic quantum “fuzz” that surrounds newly formed black holes.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by the collision of massive, compact objects in space, such as black holes or neutron stars.
“According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” explained Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at Waterloo. “This was scientists’ understanding for a long time until Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to predict that quantum particles will slowly leak out of black holes, which we now call Hawking radiation.
“Scientists have been unable to experimentally determine if any matter is escaping black holes until the very recent detection of gravitational waves,” said Afshordi. “If the quantum fuzz responsible for Hawking radiation does exist around black holes, gravitational waves could bounce off of it, which would create smaller gravitational wave signals following the main gravitational collision event, similar to repeating echoes.”
Afshordi and his coauthor Jahed Abedi from Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik in Germany, have reported the first tentative findings of these repeating echoes, providing experimental evidence that black holes may be radically different from what Einstein’s theory of relativity predicts, and lack event horizons.
They used gravitational wave data from the first observation of a neutron star collision, recorded by the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detectors.
The echoes observed by Afshordi and Abedi match the simulated echoes predicted by models of black holes that account for the effects of quantum mechanics and Hawking radiation.
“Our results are still tentative because there is a very small chance that what we see is due to random noise in the detectors, but this chance becomes less likely as we find more examples,” said Afshordi. “Now that scientists know what we’re looking for, we can look for more examples, and have a much more robust confirmation of these signals. Such a confirmation would be the first direct probe of the quantum structure of space-time.”
The study Echoes from the Abyss: A highly spinning black hole remnant for the binary neutron star merger GW170817 was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in November, and was awarded the first place Buchalter Cosmology Prize in January 2020.
The monster galaxy that suddenly died.
It lived 12 billion years ago — an incredible span of time — churning out stars at a high rate, and then, it suddenly died.
We are talking, of course, about the monster galaxy XMM-2599, subject of a study published in the latest edition of the Astrophysical Journal, Xinhua reported.
“Even before the universe was 2 billion years old, XMM-2599 had already formed a mass of more than 300 billion suns, making it an ultramassive galaxy,” said the study’s lead author Benjamin Forrest, with University of California Riverside (UC Riverside).
The researchers also found that the galaxy formed most of its stars in a huge frenzy when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, the report said. It formed more than 1,000 solar masses a year in stars at its peak of activity, which was an extremely high rate of star formation.
Then the galaxy became inactive by the time the universe was only 1.8 billion years old, perhaps because it stopped getting fuel or it became a massive black hole, according to the study.
“Our results call for changes in how models turn off star formation in early galaxies,” said Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside in whose lab Forrest works.
The evolutionary pathway of XMM-2599 is unclear. Michael Cooper, a professor of astronomy at UC Irvine and the study’s co-author, said, “Perhaps during the following 11.7 billion years of cosmic history, XMM-2599 will become the central member of one of the brightest and most massive clusters of galaxies in the local universe.”
“Alternatively, it could continue to exist in isolation. Or we could have a scenario that lies between these two outcomes,” Cooper said.
The team used the powerful Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration at the W. M. Keck Observatory to make measurements of galaxy, the report said.
Artificial intelligence 'sees' quantum advantages.
Russian researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Valiev Institute of Physics and Technology, and ITMO University have created a neural network that learned to predict the behavior of a quantum system by "looking" at its network structure. The neural network autonomously finds solutions that are well-adapted toward quantum advantage demonstrations. This will aid researchers in developing new efficient quantum computers. The findings are reported in the New Journal of Physics.
A wide range of problems in modern science are solved through quantum mechanical calculations. Some of the examples are research into chemical reactions and the search for stable molecular structures for medicine, pharmaceutics, and other industries. The quantum nature of the problems involved makes quantum computations better-suited to them. Classical computations, by contrast, tend to return only bulky approximate solutions.
Creating quantum computers is costly and time-consuming, and the resulting devices are not guaranteed to exhibit any quantum advantage. That is, operate faster than a conventional computer. So researchers need tools for predicting whether a given quantum device will have a quantum advantage.
One of the ways to implement quantum computations is quantum walks. In simplified terms, the method can be visualized as a particle traveling in a certain network, which underlies a quantum circuit.
If a particle's quantum walk from one network node to another happens faster than its classical analogue, a device based on that circuit will have a quantum advantage. The search for such superior networks is an important task tackled by quantum walk experts.
What the Russian researchers did is they replaced the experts with artificial intelligence. They trained the machine to distinguish between networks and tell if a given network will deliver quantum advantage. This pinpoints the networks that are good candidates for building a quantum computer.
The team used a neural network geared toward image recognition. An adjacency matrix served as the input data, along with the numbers of the input and output nodes. The neural network returned a prediction of whether the classical or the quantum walk between the given nodes would be faster.
"It was not obvious this approach would work, but it did. We have been quite successful in training the computer to make autonomous predictions of whether a complex network has a quantum advantage," said Associate Professor Leonid Fedichkin of the theoretical physics department at MIPT.
"The line between quantum and classical behaviors is often blurred. The distinctive feature of our study is the resulting special-purpose computer vision, capable of discerning this fine line in the network space," added MIPT graduate and ITMO University researcher Alexey Melnikov.
With their co-author Alexander Alodjants, the researchers created a tool that simplifies the development of computational circuits based on quantum algorithms. The resulting devices will be of interest in biophotonics research and materials science.
One of the processes that quantum walks describe well is the excitation of photosensitive proteins, such as rhodopsin or chlorophyll. A protein is a complex molecule whose structure resembles a network. Solving a problem that formally involves finding the quantum walk time from one node to another may actually reveal what happens to an electron at a particular position in a molecule, where it will move, and what kind of excitation it will cause.
Compared with architectures based on qubits and gates, quantum walks are expected to offer an easier way to implement the quantum calculation of natural phenomena. The reason for this is that the walks themselves are a natural physical process.
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