A recent article in phys.org details PhD candidate Sasa Gazibegovic's thesis and her discovery that hashtags made of superconducting nano wires can produce stable, entangled pairs of majorana fermions.
For those who don't already know, Fermions are the group of particles which follow Fermi–Dirac statistics. These particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include all quarks and leptons, as well as all composite particles made of an odd number of these, such as all baryons and many atoms and nuclei. Fermions differ from bosons, which obey Bose–Einstein statistics.
A fermion can be an elementary particle, such as the electron, or it can be a composite particle, such as the proton. According to the spin-statistics theorem in any reasonable relativistic quantum field theory, particles with integer spin are bosons, while particles with half-integer spin are fermions.
Majorana fermions are fermions which are their own anti-particle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion
It is important to note that majorana fermions don't really exist in the same sense an electron or a photon exists. They are quasi-particle excitations, meaning that they are the result of getting several particles to act as one.
With majorana fermions you assign a single wave function to a group of particles that then act as a cohesive whole.
Where she has innovated here is by entangling pairs of majorana fermions by passing them along the hashtag shaped nano-wire and back, effectively braiding their wave functions together.
This is an amazing result and very exciting.
The long haul problem on general purpose quantum computers is that qubits and quantum logic gates are remarkably unstable. Once produced, marjorana fermion pairs have the property of being extremely stable without any extraordinary steps like noise elimination and cryogenics.
The process she details is entirely solid state and could be achieved by any reasonably recent fab.
Thus by using Ms. Gazibegovic's process, we may soon be able to construct general purpose quantum computers that are as accessible as modern solid state computers. Now if someone can just come up with a good programming language for it.
More good reading here..
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-years-closer-mistery-majorana-particles.html
Truthfully when I read this article I thought it was crackpot. A solid state process for producing stable qubits at room temperature? It violates a lot of what I thought I knew. But I researched it, this is legit and the author is well published and cited in her field.
https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/departments/applied-physics/the-department/staff/detail/ep/e/d/ep-uid/20159542/ep-tab/4/
My instincts tell me this discovery / invention will end up being as transformative to quantum computing as the transistor was to classical computing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 12 2019, @08:46PM (3 children)
What, no Twitter hivemind harvested for quantum processing and key generation?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by sshelton76 on Sunday May 12 2019, @09:11PM (2 children)
Yeah I clickbaited that headline based on an image in the linked article. I needed something interesting and it was hard coming up with something given the source material.
Still, this is a really cool result and if it pans out, we may be sitting on the cusp of a revolution that will make the modern transistor look as primitive as vacuum tubes and relays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:26PM (1 child)
A hashtag is so named because it is a combination of a hash character (#) and a textual tag.
If you wanted to make clickbait out of it, you should've made a weed reference.
(Score: 1) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:04PM
How about this: I think hashtags and marijuana fermions are just the breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @09:13PM
talking about hashtag is already abusive on twitter as the system's not different from any other tag system on any other site, but this title is just plain nonsense
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @09:53PM
Hashttags, quantum computing, in the title line...
Mod me up/down if you actually managed to read TFS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:06PM (2 children)
just.. say.. FSCK NO
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2019, @10:15PM
That's what they said when Einstein published his early articles in the National Enquirer, and he went on to win the Nobel Prize.
What's most interesting is that this is a lady scientist and if this hashtag-braiding technique takes off she could be the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. It's about time!
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday May 13 2019, @12:25AM
by Eindhoven University of Technology
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:15PM (1 child)
Terrible headline made up by terrible submitter. Editors -- as usual -- not doing their "job." Soylnet News CIRCLING THE DRAIN. Ban submitter and give all subscribers an extra day in reparations!!!!
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday May 13 2019, @04:20AM
Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hartree on Monday May 13 2019, @04:52AM (1 child)
It's a real area of research. Much of the work on topological insulators that you may have heard of is eyeing that as an application, but that's the long shot.
Now to what it's about for those completely mystified: (And, forgive me, my expertise is somewhat limited here, so it will be a stick figure sketch)
Electronic states in matter are largely specified by their symmetries (Landau symmetry breaking theory, named for Russian physicist Lev Landau). These ideas led to a lot of nifty solid state electronic applications.
It turns out that there are distinct electronic states in matter that are not seen as different by these symmetries, but they definitely are different from each other. They differ topologically. (Yeah, it's about half just words to me too.)
The effect is that before, we thought we had a guide to all the electronic states (a bit like the periodic table is a guide to elements), but found out there are some states that we didn't know about. Physicists love that sort of thing as there is a whole new set of interesting ways for electrons to behave in matter that they hadn't looked at before. It would be a bit like a chemist finding that there were extra elements in the periodic table in between the others. Very exciting.
The icing on the cake is that some of these states might behave in a way that allows for quantum computation that is very insensitive to the noise of the world that wrecks the states of most usual type quantum logic systems unless they are cooled and otherwise insulated from the world around them. These states are called "topologically protected". To be useful for computation, these states must have a mathematical property that the order that operations are done on them matters. That's called being nonabellian. Normal arithmetic multiplication is abellian as 2 times 5 is the same as 5 times 2, for example. An example of a nonabellian operations is matrix multiplication where matrix A times matrix B is not always the same as matrix B times matrix A. The order matters.
These Majorana fermions may, and I repeat may have this property in some cases. It's an area of very active research right now (including at the school I work at). Lots of people are searching for the topological gold at the end of the quantum rainbow guided by compasses like Angle Resolved Photo-electron Spectroscopy which tells you about the electronic states in these materials.
It's been several years since I last went to talks on this subject over at the physics department so I'm not that well clued in to what the current state of the art is. There have been advances, and people have fairly definitely demonstrated some things that act like Majorana fermions. There's still a lot to be done and still a lot that could derail it. But, generally, when we find new types of order within nature someone figures out a way to do something useful with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 13 2019, @05:23AM
I wish I had mod points. Excellent summary and exposition!