10 ms·
Scientists use quantum device to slow chemical process by factor of 100B
- mycall 3y agoCan a quantum device speed up a chemical process by the same?
- 10g1k 3y agoUnfortunately they didn't change the speed of a process. They mapped the process and them change the replay speed to watch it, like changing the play speed on a video.
- rbanffy 3y agoOne technique, with repeating processes, is to observe adjacent very thin slices of time from different cycles. This is how movies of short light pulses moving through space are made.
- 10g1k 3y agoThis stuff is straight up magic.
- syspec 3y agoIt's literally not
- felixyz 3y agoIs anything? Or is there a possibility they didn't intend for an implicit "literally" to placed in there?
- rbanffy 3y agoIt's fair to say "sufficiently advanced technology".
- chottocharaii 3y agowhy take it literally
- DennisP 3y agoThere's always someone who doesn't know all the dictionary meanings of "magic." From Google's copy of the Oxford English dictionary: - a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, especially in a way that gives delight. - something that has a delightfully unusual quality. - very effective in producing results, especially desired ones. - (informal, British) wonderful; exciting.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoSo it doesn't tick any of those boxes expect maybe half of the first? Sounds like it's literally not magic.
- DennisP 3y agoI'd say all of them but YMMV.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoWhen was the last time quantum physics sparked delight in a member of the general public? Sorry, let me rephrase: has there even been a first time?
- DennisP 3y agoI'm a member of the general public and it's done that lots of times for me. Besides that, "member of the general public" isn't part of Oxford's definitions. If the "magic" commenter above is a professional quantum physicist, that doesn't invalidate their feelings about this. If you're more jaded, that doesn't make your own feelings more valid or authoritative. In any case, this is getting a bit tedious and silly.
- raylad 3y agoSo they simulated a chemical process, and the simulation ran 100B times slower than the actual chemical process? Kind of like how simulating anything in detail tends to be a lot slower than the actual thing you're simulating? Is the difference here that it's basically an analog rather than a digital simulation? Not following if there was any breakthrough here or not.
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- fnordpiglet 3y ago> “Our experiment wasn’t a digital approximation of the process – this was a direct analogue observation of the quantum dynamics unfolding at a speed we could observe,” he said. No, they didn’t simulate it in the way we typically simulate. They created a physical process that was an analogue of the actual process but 100b times slower so they could directly observe it.
- raylad 3y agoThat sounds awfully like an analogue simulation.
- colordrops 3y agoSounds like a semantics debate about the meaning of the word "simulation".
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- fsloth 3y agoNo. An analogue system is not a simulation. A simulation is some approximation - a model - of a physical system that you compute with some finite precision. An analogue is a physical entity with the same physics as some other thing. A straightforward engineering example would be scale model of an airplane in a wind-tunnel.
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoI was reading a book hoping to work out how to derive E=mc2. My idea was to go from being about 400 years behind science to merely being 100 years behind. This sort of reporting makes me realise those 100 years are not linear. I had to go check that this was real - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01300-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-023-01300-3, because it could have as easily been a marketing site for the next Marvel movie for all I could ground it in my understanding of experimentation.
- sytelus 3y agoThis is really a bad idea to study anything. Actually this is what sets aside naïve hobbyist interested in Physics vs someone studying Physics systematically and efficiently as part of PhD program. I did this mistake repeatedly. I started with annotated version of Newton's Principia, spent about a year just pulling my hair and gave up to realize how much time I had lost in all kind of minutia, noise and random things that were completely useless to develop good understanding of core principles. I repeated this mistake yet again by buying Maxwell's original publications and wasting yet another year. And then again with Einstein's original papers and wasting yet another year. I thought I would do differently and everyone else was doing wrong. I was the one doing wrong. I didn't learned much from all these original manuscript. I also lost precious years which I could have obtained real Masters degree. It is super important to understand that original manuscripts have tons of noise and baggage that only make sense in historical context. They also have unbacked goods which are super hard to digest, if you can digest at all. A ton of experts have already spent their lives distilling these original writings that fits with everything else, easy to digest and doesn't have all that noise. So, get a good textbook and follow that. Stop chasing original manuscripts.
- regularfry 3y agoThere's a related idea, which is that there's no reason that the first person to discover something will happen to find the best way to teach it. In fact there are many reasons for that not to be the case: their own understanding is nestled in a complex web of adjacent trivia, some of which is critical but they don't realise it, and some of which is unrelated but seems vital to them.
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- sytelus 3y agoWhat does this mean? Can you slow down time? I would assume you must also slow down physics in order to slow down chemistry. No?
- magicalhippo 3y agoThey're using an analogous system. The speed of the process in the analog does not have to be the same as in the original system, in terms of wall-clock time.
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- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThey’ve discovered Administratium! https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/Administratium.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/Admi...
- Qwertious 3y ago>According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second. There are 86k seconds in a day. 345 600 seconds in 4 days. This quantum-slowing effect reduces the speed by 100 000 000 000. Administratium is about as close to the actual speed of the reaction as it is to the slowed-speed reaction.
- datameta 3y agoI think you might have miscompared to a day instead of a second? Unless I missed something. But you're right that if we were to be observing the administratium reaction over one millisecond in the slowed scenario, it would take 2.73 nanoseconds at full speed, nothing like femtoscale.
- refulgentis 3y ago> ...administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second. Let x = administartium slowdown effect = 4 days / 1 second x = 4 days * 24 hours / day x = 96 hours * 60 minutes / hour x = 5760 minutes * 60 seconds / minute x = 345600 seconds Wrote this out to also convince myself, I am 35, did physics for 3 years in undergrad, and am apparently still bamboozled by orders of magnitude regularly. Completely unintuitive! In fact, lemme do it in reverse, I'm shocked. Given x = slowdown factor = 100B = 100_000_000_000 x = 100_000_000_000 seconds / (60 seconds / minute) x = 1_666_666_666 / (60 minutes / hour) x = 27_777_777 hours / 24 hours / day x = 1_157_407 days / 365 days / year x = 3,170 years!
- datameta 3y ago
- astrashe2 3y agoDoes anyone have any idea how a person could go about trying to understand the basics of what's going on here, even in just a hand wavey way? This is so far above my head it seems like magic.
- walnutclosefarm 3y agoThere are chemical processes, most notably photochemical processes like photosynthesis, that funnel molecular states into new configurations so rapidly, that observation of the details of the reaction is impossible. This research simulated one class of such reactions (conical intersection reactions) by modeling the wave function that governs the time evolution of the reaction using a quantum computer, allowing them to run the reaction 100B times slower than occurs in nature, and to measure the quantum state evolution. They are thus able to get a clear picture of how the reaction proceeds, as measured by several different observables, from the simulation. It's a direct demonstration of the utility of quantum computation in molecular modeling. The meta-relevance, to me at least, is that it demonstrates real progress in one of the areas where quantum computation is most likely to have an important impact.
- astrashe2 3y agoThank you, this is helpful.
- Horffupolde 3y agoA factor of 1e11, while large, is commonly found in chemistry where most phenomena have a log relationship. The standard pH scale, for example, already spans 14 orders of magnitude.
- datameta 3y agoI think there is a key difference in magnitudes of ion concentration vs time. At this scale, a faster detector seems to be comparatively less trivial than a more sensitive one.
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- AbrahamParangi 3y agoYou know, I think these sorts is scientific research explainers would be better if they actually just said what they did, what the insight was, what we can do now or what predictions we can now make. I understand the desire to make the discovery accessible but this does not accomplish that. If we measure information by “what predictions can a reader now make that they couldn’t make before” then this press release is information free. Instead we have a lot of words to attempt to create the impression of having read something.
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- verisimi 3y ago> This allowed them to design and map this very complicated problem onto a relatively small quantum device – and then slow the process down by a factor of 100 billion. They say they mapped the problem.... So is this a model of an observation, or an actual observation? > “Until now, we have been unable to directly observe the dynamics of ‘geometric phase’; it happens too fast to probe experimentally. > “Using quantum technologies, we have addressed this problem.” 'cos if its a model, they are obviously still not observing whatever-it-is directly, right? PS I'm pretty sure they are talking about their model.
- verisimi 3y agoYou've got to love the declaration at the end of the article: > The research was supported by grants from the US Office of Naval Research; the US Army Research Office Laboratory for Physical Sciences; the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity; Lockheed Martin; the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group, Sydney Quantum; a University of Sydney-University of California San Diego Partnership Collaboration Award; H. and A. Harley; and by computational resources from the Australian Government’s National Computational Infrastructure. This is sponsored by the military.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoIs that a bad thing? Isn't a large amount of computing research paid for by the military?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoSure, but you're using the internet, courtesy of military-funded research, using electricity that's been routed through distribution and substations that exist thanks to military-funded research, travel places based on GPS, courtesy of direct military research, your modern life is only possible because just like everyone else, the military has a budget allocated for researching computing and electronics advances that they can use, which invariably translates to things the private sector can use. So what's your point?
- verisimi 3y agoWell, it does make it clear that human advancement is along the terms set by military diktat - there's nothing natural about it. Why should we be worried that the military fund the internet, quantum computing, etc? Can there be any reason for concern? Could it be that the military is less concerned about external threats, but way more concerned about managing internal ones? And that funding technology to create a technocratic panopticon has been long in the making? If directing technology towards technocratic infrastructure, such goals are really pretty complete, when you think about it.. Surely only a couple more elections before it is switched on, if that.
- dav_Oz 3y agoI guess some theoretical chemistry basics omitted in the short article wouldn't hurt: In order to describe chemical reactions or atomic arrangements in terms of wave equations one normally treats the motion of the nuclei (slow/heavy) and the motion of the electrons (fast/light) separately simplifying the Schrödinger equation to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. In introductory chemistry textbooks [0] a diatomic example is mostly used as an illustration, for >2 atoms usually only the ground state is considered. This is because (1) in a diatomic setting the vibrational degree of freedom in the nucleus reduces to 1 and (2) the ground state can be well distinguished from other electronic states. However when studying (advanced theoretical) chemistry or material sciences, polyatomic arrangement with tightly packed electronic states and a lot of nuclear degrees of freedom are the norm and the theory of so-called conical intersection of electronic energies essential in that regard. Early on this was taken into account as the Jahn-Teller distortion[1]: a kind of spontaneous symmetry-breaking which seemed exotic when it was first described in the 1930s; in that same vein Teller later proposed an ultrarare occurrence within a few vibrational periods (sub-femtoseconds) by which a loss of electronic excitation was not followed by a photon being emitted: radiationless decay. Now, in refined orbital models [2] this seems to be a normal state of affairs e.g. in organic chemistry.[3] Because of the tiny time scales involved theoretically predicted phenomena like a Geometrical phase/Berry phase (which itself has the Foucault pendulum in relation to Earth's latitude as its mechanical analogue [4]) have not been observed, yet. So borrowing from a topological analogue (Dirac points) [5] a quantum simulation seemed feasible. To be honest the actual paper [6] linked in the article was hard to follow through so I found a similar paper [7] where the presentation of the general idea is more clear and concise. [0]https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Pacific_Union_College/Quantum_Chemistry/09%3A_Chemical_Bonding_in_Diatomic_Molecules/9.01%3A_The_Born-Oppenheimer_Approximation_Simplifies_the_Schr%C3%B6dinger_Equation_for_Molecules https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Pacific_Union_College/Qu... [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahn%E2%80%93Teller_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahn%E2%80%93Teller_effect [2]https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9426023.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9426023.pdf [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenching_(fluorescence) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenching_(fluorescence) [4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_phase#Foucault_pendulum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_phase#Foucault_pen... [5]https://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2015/08/conical-intersections-vs-dirac-cones.html?m=1 https://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2015/08/conical-inter... [6]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.07320.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.07320.pdf [7]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.07319.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.07319.pdf
- dazzaji 3y agoI’m stuck on how it is known that the quantum analog is operating the same as what it is an analog of. I’m completely out of my depth so I fed the paper to Claude 2 and, after some back and forth, got this: “You raise a good point. There is no absolute certainty that the analog quantum system operated in exactly the same way as the original chemical reaction dynamics it was meant to model. Some key caveats and limitations include: - The analog system is still an approximation, so there may be small differences in how the dynamics play out compared to the real system. - Mapping a complex molecular system onto qubits necessarily requires simplifications and abstractions that could influence the outcomes. - Factors like experimental errors, imperfect state preparation or measurement in the trapped ion system may introduce discrepancies. - Important details like multi-particle interactions or higher-order effects may not be fully captured. - Verification that the analog system exhibits the same identifying signatures or phenomena as the natural system would strengthen confidence in the analogy. So while the researchers aim to design the quantum analog to faithfully mimic the essential physics, perfect equivalence cannot be taken for granted due to modeling approximations and technological limitations. The mapping should be validated by testing for characteristic properties before concluding the slow-motion "observations" definitively represent the original phenomenon. With improvements, analog quantum simulation could provide increasingly accurate models of chemistry.” Is this a reasonably well grounded statement? And if so, how can anybody hope to verify the analog is exhibiting “the same identifying signatures or phenomena as the natural system” if the whole point is that we can’t observe the natural system with any precision to start with?