Latest news with #Planck
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Google Doodle Marks World Quantum Day 2025 — What That's All About
A model of a quantum computer's chip, on display at the opening of an IBM quantum data center in ... More 2024. Wondering what's going on in Monday's Google Doodle? The artwork illustrates a principle that's fundamental to quantum computing in celebration of World Quantum Day. The event, in its third year, takes place annually on April 14 to promote awareness and understanding of the fast-advancing fields of quantum science and technology. The Doodle shows each letter of the word 'Google' as a thaumatrope, an optical toy that displays different pictures on either side of a spinning disk. 'When spun rapidly, our brains superimpose both images so they appear to combine and form one image,' Google explains of the animated Doodle. 'The thaumatrope helps illustrate the concept of quantum superposition: when a particle exists in multiple states at once.' The April Doodle for April 14 pays tribute to all things quantum. Quantum mechanics involves the study of particle behavior at the atomic and subatomic level. The Doodle launches as quantum computers, which can execute extraordinarily speedy calculations, promise to do everything from transform financial and manufacturing industries to reduce damage from climate change and push the boundaries of art. Quantum scientists from around the world initiated World Quantum Day to spur engagement with quantum concepts. Quantum scientists from around the world launched World Quantum Day to spark public engagement with quantum concepts. It's celebrated on April 14, a nod to 4.14, the rounded first digits of Planck's constant, a key value in quantum mechanics. Last year, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution introduced to commemorate and support World Quantum Day's goals. 'The World Quantum Day initiative is an important reminder of the progress already made in this technology field and the need to ensure our children have the skills they need to continue that progress in the future,' Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who introduced the resolution with two fellow senators, said at the time. World Quantum Day 2025 is part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology designated by UNESCO. The IYQ site lists numerous April 14 events hosted by governments, academic institutions and laboratories around the globe: in Armenia, Brazil, India, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the U.S., among other places. Most aim to make quantum concepts more widely accessible. That's the goal of Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost, whose immersive installation 'We Felt a Star Dying' — showing in Berlin through May 7 — explores how we might perceive reality from a quantum perspective. Prouvost engage audiences in quantum fundamentals not through complex explanations of concepts like qubits, but through video and sound developed with a quantum computer, as well scent and sculptural elements reflecting quantum phenomena. In the quantum realm, 'everything is untangled and belongs to one another,' the multimedia artist told me when we spoke earlier this year. 'Quantum-ness can break any sense of barrier that we didn't know was possible to break. There's this sense of everything at once.'
Leaders
04-04-2025
- Business
- Leaders
C4IR Saudi Arabia to Host Global Experts for World Quantum Day 2025
The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Saudi Arabia, in partnership with King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and Saudi Aramco, will host 'Discovering Quantum Possibilities' on Monday, April 14, 2025, at The Garage. This event, part of the World Quantum Day (WQD) 2025 celebrations, will bring together global experts to explore cutting-edge advancements in quantum science and technology. Designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), 2025 marks a century of quantum breakthroughs. The event will convene leaders from government, industry, and academia to discuss the transformative impact of quantum technologies across various sectors. Symbolic Date for Quantum Science April 14 was chosen for World Quantum Day as it reflects the first three digits of Planck's constant (4.14)—a fundamental physics constant defining the minimum energy a quantum particle can carry. This date serves as a fitting tribute to the foundational principles of quantum mechanics. Distinguished Speakers, Thought Leaders The event will feature prominent global figures, including: Dr. Talal Al-Sedairy, Senior Vice President, Research and Development, KACST Dr. Mariam Nouh, Vice President, Economies of the Future, KACST Dr. Sebastian Buckup, Head of Network and Partnerships, World Economic Forum Eng. Muhammad AlSaiyari, Quantum Valley Lead, Saudi Aramco & Chairman, Saudi Quantum Computing Association Professor Ibrahim Niaz, CEO, National Technology Development Program Ilyas Khan, CEO, Quantum Computing at Cambridge & Vice Chairman, Quantinuum Rebecca Krauthammer, Founder & Chief Product Officer, QuSecure Vision for Saudi Arabia's Quantum Future Dr. Basma Al-Buhairan, Managing Director of C4IR Saudi Arabia, emphasized the Kingdom's commitment to advancing innovation and shaping policies to harness the full potential of quantum technologies. 'World Quantum Day provides a platform for global experts to engage, promote regulatory advancements, and raise awareness of quantum's transformative power in building a sustainable future,' she noted. Recognizing Quantum Innovation The event will also spotlight emerging quantum solutions by announcing the winners of the 'UpLink Quantum for Society' challenge, a collaboration between C4IR Saudi Arabia and the World Economic Forum's UpLink platform. This initiative highlights quantum-driven entrepreneurial solutions addressing global challenges. Finally, C4IR Saudi Arabia's WQD 2025 event builds on the success of last year's inaugural celebration, which attracted over 300 in-person attendees, nine expert panels, nine exhibits, and 5,000+ livestream viewers. 📌 Register now: Related Topics : Aramco Partners Pasqal to Deploy First Quantum Computer in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia-Türkiye Business Forum: Deepening Economic Ties UK Plans to Boost Innovation and Technology with Saudi Arabia Huawei Cloud Launches AI-Ready Infrastructure in Saudi Arabia for Vision 2030 Short link : Post Views: 22
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Universe's First Light Has Just Been Revealed in Stunning Detail
We just got the clearest snapshot yet of the first light that streamed through the Universe. After five years of staring unblinking at the sky, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has compiled the most detailed map we've ever seen of the cosmic microwave background – the faint light that permeates the Universe from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The results? We now have a clearer window into the infancy of the Universe, revealing with greater precision than ever how much mass exists in it, how large it is, and that the biggest crisis of cosmology – the Hubble constant – remains unresolved. The findings have been detailed in three preprint papers uploaded to arXiv and the Princeton University ACT website. "We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and galaxies," says physicist Suzanne Staggs of Princeton University in the US. "And we're not just seeing light and dark, we're seeing the polarization of light in high resolution. That is a defining factor distinguishing ACT from Planck and other, earlier telescopes." We can't see all the way back to the Big Bang. The early Universe was filled with a thick, murky, opaque fog of ionized plasma. This medium was impenetrable to light; any photons moving through the darkness simply scattered off free electrons. It wasn't until about 380,000 years after the Big Bang that these particles began to combine into neutral gas, mostly hydrogen, in what is known as the Epoch of Recombination. Once the free particles had been tucked away into atoms, light was able to spill forth, propagating throughout the Universe. That first light is the cosmic microwave background (CMB). As you can imagine, some 13.4 billion or so years later, the CMB is very, very faint and low in energy, so it takes a lot of observation time to detect it, and a lot of analysis to tease it out from amid all the other sources of light in the Universe. Compiling a map of the CMB has been the work of many decades, with the first all-sky map released in 2010, compiled from data collected by the Planck space telescope. Since then, scientists have been working to refine the map's resolution so we can learn more about how our Universe was born. This is what we have now with the latest data release from ACT, showing the intensity and polarization of the CMB with more clarity than ever. Polarization is the degree to which a light wave is rotated, which astronomers can decode to infer the nature of the environments the light has traveled through. "Before, we got to see where things were, and now we also see how they're moving," says Staggs. "Like using tides to infer the presence of the Moon, the movement tracked by the light's polarization tells us how strong the pull of gravity was in different parts of space." The CMB gives us a means of measuring the evolution of the Universe. We can look at the state of play now and at different times during the Universe's history, and compare it to the CMB to chart the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang. "We've measured more precisely that the observable Universe extends almost 50 billion light-years in all directions from us," says cosmologist Erminia Calabrese of the University of Cardiff in the UK, "and contains as much mass as 1,900 'zetta-suns', or almost 2 trillion trillion Suns." Most of that mass is invisible. Normal baryonic matter makes up just 100 zetta-suns of the Universe's mass. That's everything we can detect – stars, galaxies, planets, people, black holes, gas, dust – all that stuff. Of this normal matter, 75 zetta-suns are hydrogen, and 25 zetta-suns are helium. The rest of the elements in the Universe combined have so little mass that they don't even make a dent in the pie chart. Another 500 zetta-suns make up invisible dark matter, the nature of which is unknown. The remaining 1,300 zetta-suns constitute dark energy, the name we give to the invisible force pushing space to expand faster than we can see. This brings us to the Hubble constant, which represents the expansion rate of the Universe. We go into the minutiae in more detail here, but the short version is that measurements of the distant Universe based on data such as the CMB show a slower expansion rate than measurements of the local Universe based on data such as supernovae. The former is around 67 or 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec, the latter around 73 or 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec. It's pretty fascinating, and worth reading about further if you have the inclination, but the upshot of this tension is that astronomers are trying to take better and better measurements of the Universe to try and close the gap between the two measurement ranges. The new map of the CMB gave a Hubble constant of 69.9 kilometers per second per megaparsec. It's one of the most rigorous measurements yet, and in good agreement with other values for the Hubble constant based on the CMB. "It was slightly surprising to us that we didn't find even partial evidence to support the higher value," Staggs says. "There were a few areas where we thought we might see evidence for explanations of the tension, and they just weren't there in the data." So that's still a problem that needs to be resolved. But the repeated, rigorous calculations seem to be increasingly hinting that either there's something crucial we're missing, or the Universe is quite a bit weirder than we thought. But that blobby, orange-and-blue map is bringing us closer to figuring it out, a testament to the insatiable curiosity and tireless ingenuity of human science. "We can see right back through cosmic history," says astrophysicist Jo Dunkley of Princeton University. "From our own Milky Way, out past distant galaxies hosting vast black holes, and huge galaxy clusters, all the way to that time of infancy." The three papers have been uploaded to arXiv and are available on the Princeton website. Incredible Video Shows Blood Moon Eclipse From Lunar Perspective Stranded NASA Astronauts Embrace Relief Crew in Joyous Scenes Incredible Image Reveals a Cosmic Hourglass Shimmering in Space
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists suggest the upper limit for room temperature superconductivity
Superconductors are game-changing materials that can transform everything, ranging from healthcare to energy transmission and quantum computing. But there's a catch—they work at extremely low temperatures (close to absolute zero). This limitation has prevented us from harnessing their full potential. To address this challenge, scientists have been actively working on developing room-temperature superconductors, but they often wonder — is there an upper temperature limit for superconductivity? The answer to this question is crucial to determining whether superconductivity can truly exist at room temperature. For instance, if a theoretical upper limit exists below room temperature, then achieving room-temperature superconductivity would be fundamentally impossible. Finally, a team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London has found the answer. In their new study, they reveal the factors affecting the upper limit and the maximum temperature range suitable for superconductivity. The study authors shed light on the role of fundamental physical constants—such as electron mass, Planck's constant (h), electron charge, and the fine-structure constant (α). It is already known that these constants 'govern everything from the stability of atoms to the formation of stars and synthesis of carbon and other elements essential to life.' For instance, in any solid, atoms oscillate around fixed positions due to thermal energy. The speed of these vibrations depends on two key factors: bond strength and atomic mass. Both these factors are determined by quantum mechanics and electromagnetism, which are governed by fundamental constants. By analyzing how these constants influence atomic interactions, the study authors discovered that the constants place a strict upper limit on how fast atoms can vibrate in solid materials. This means there is a maximum possible frequency for phonons, which are the collective vibrations of atoms in a material. In many superconductors, phonons play a crucial role in pairing up electrons (Cooper pairs), enabling superconductivity. The frequency of phonons affects the strength of this pairing and, in turn, determines the highest possible temperature (TC) at which superconductivity can occur. Since fundamental constants impose an upper limit on phonon frequencies, they also place a theoretical constraint on how high TC can be in superconductors. This means that 'the upper limit of superconducting temperature TC is intrinsically linked to the fundamental constants of nature – the electron mass, electron charge, and the Planck constant,' the study authors note. Using the fundamental constants, the study authors determined that superconductivity can exist between a temperature of 100 Kelvin to 1000 Kelvin; this upper limit range for TC includes standard room temperature values that lie between 293 K to 298 K (20 to 25°C). 'The fact that room-temperature superconductivity is theoretically possible, given our Universe's constants, is encouraging. It's a call to keep exploring, experimenting, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible," the researchers said. They claim that their findings have been validated by a separate research work. The study is published in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.
