Looks like Pluto’s got some competition. Two sets of astronomers have spotted a new planetoid in the outskirts of our Solar System. It is the brightest object in the region after Pluto, and it has its own small moon. … In recent years astronomers have spotted several Kuiper-belt planetoids, including ones named Quaoar and Varuna; [...]
One of the cool things about being a scientist these days is that the level of international collaboration is fairly high, and this means that one gets to make exciting trips to exciting lands. Last week I booked some travel for the end of the summer. Italy and Singapore. What a rough rough life!
Scott Aaronson has a nice diatribe “Are Quantum States Exponentially Long Vectors?” which he’s posted on the arXiv as quant-ph/0507242. In this note he discusses his own personal counter to certain objections to quantum computation. It’s a very nice read. My favorite part of the article is where Scott comes out as a full on [...]
Geonknitting points out something that reminds me of one applied physics course I took at Caltech: Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass
Steve Flammia points me to this cool game. Well at least it’s cool if you are the computer science type.
If Moore’s law continues at its current pace, sometime between 2040 and 2050 the basic elements of a computer will be atomic sized. And even if Moore’s law slows, we eventually hope that computers will be made of components which are atomic sized. Either way, we really believe that it might be possible to get [...]
Big news for ion trap quantum computers. It seems that Christopher Monroe’s ion trap group at the University of Michigan has suceeded in getting ions to shuttle around the corner of a T in their ion traps (their news item is dated 6/11/05, for this result.) This is, needless to say, a crucial step in [...]
Some interesting papers. First, a paper by Andrew Childs and Wim van Dam, “Quantum algorithm for a generalized hidden shift problem”, quant-ph/0507190 which gives a very nice, new algorithm for, well, for what it says: hidden shift problems! Interestingly their new algorithm uses Lenstra’s classical integer programing algorithm to implement an entangled measurement on the [...]
Scott Aaronson has written a nice article “Ten Semi-Grand Challenges for Quantum Computing Theory”. If you are a computer science theory researcher interested in what to work on in quantum computing, I highly recommend the list. One thing I find very interesting about theory work in computer science is how religious researchers are about not [...]
On the quant-ph arXiv, today, we find, Steven van Enk having way too much fun: Quantum Physics, abstractquant-ph/0507189 From: Steven J. van Enk [view email] Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 19:10:35 GMT (2kb) |0>|1>+|1>|0> Authors: S.J. van Enk Comments: 1.1 page, unnormalized title is entangled. (There is nothing more in the abstract, but quant-ph does [...]
Three Toed Sloth (who has been attending the complex systems summer school in China which I was supposed to attend before my life turned upside down and I ran off to Seattle) has an interesting post on Landauer’s principle. Landauer’s principle is roughly the principle that erasing information in thermodynamics disipates an amount of entropy [...]
