Physics

Quantum tech is going green.

A new take on highly sensitive magnetic field sensors ditches the power-hungry lasers that previous devices have relied on to make their measurements and replaces them with sunlight. Lasers can gobble 100 watts or so of power — like keeping a bright lightbulb burning. The innovation potentially untethers quantum sensors from that energy need. The result is an environmentally friendly prototype on the forefront of technology, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Physical Review X Energy.

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The big twist is in how the device uses sunlight. It doesn’t use solar cells to convert light into electricity. Instead, the sunlight does the job of the laser’s light, says Jiangfeng Du, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.   

Quantum magnetometers often include a powerful green laser to measure magnetic fields. The laser shines on a diamond that contains atomic defects (SN: 2/26/08). The defects result when nitrogen atoms replace some of the carbon atoms that pure diamonds are made of. The green laser causes the nitrogen defects to fluoresce, emitting red light with an intensity that depends on the strength of the surrounding magnetic fields.

The new quantum sensor needs green light too. There’s plenty of that in sunlight, as seen in the green wavelengths reflected from tree leaves and grass. To collect enough of it to run their magnetometer, Du and colleagues replaced the laser with a lens 15 centimeters across to gather sunlight. They then filtered the light to remove all colors but green and focused it on a diamond with nitrogen atom defects. The result is red fluorescence that reveals magnetic field strengths just as laser-equipped magnetometers do.

Green-colored light shining on the diamond-based sensor in a quantum device can be used to measure magnetic fields. In this prototype, a lens (top) collects sunlight, which is filtered to leave only green wavelengths of light. That green light provides an environmentally friendly alternative to the light created by power-hungry lasers that conventional quantum devices rely on.Yunbin Zhu/University of Science and Technology of China

Changing energy from one type to another, as happens when solar cells collect light and produce electricity, is an inherently inefficient process (SN: 7/26/17). The researchers claim that avoiding the conversion of sunlight to electricity to run lasers makes their approach three times more efficient than would be possible with solar cells powering lasers.

“I’ve never seen any other reports that connect solar research to quantum technologies,” says Yen-Hung Lin, a physicist at the University of Oxford who was not involved with the study. “It might well ignite a spark of interest in this unexplored direction, and we could see more interdisciplinary research in the field of energy.”

Quantum devices sensitive to other things, like electric fields or pressure, could also benefit from the sunlight-driven approach, the researchers say. In particular, space-based quantum technology might use the intense sunlight available outside Earth’s atmosphere to provide light tailored for quantum sensors. The remaining light, in wavelengths that the quantum sensors don’t use, could be relegated to solar cells that power electronics to process the quantum signals.

The sunlight-driven magnetometer is just a first step in the melding of quantum and environmentally sustainable technology. “In the current state, this device is primarily for developmental purposes,” Du says. “We expect that the devices will be used for practical purposes. But there [is] lots of work to be done.” More

Stealthy communication just got more secure, thanks to quantum entanglement.

Quantum physics provides a way to share secret information that’s mathematically proven to be safe from the prying eyes of spies. But until now, demonstrations of the technique, called quantum key distribution, rested on an assumption: The devices used to create and measure quantum particles have to be known to be flawless. Hidden defects could allow a stealthy snoop to penetrate the security unnoticed.

Now, three teams of researchers have demonstrated the ability to perform secure quantum communication without prior confirmation that the devices are foolproof. Called device-independent quantum key distribution, the method is based on quantum entanglement, a mysterious relationship between particles that links their properties even when separated over long distances.

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In everyday communication, such as the transmission of credit card numbers over the internet, a secret code, or key, is used to garble the information, so that it can be read only by someone else with the key. But there’s a quandary: How can a distant sender and receiver share that key with one another while ensuring that no one else has intercepted it along the way?

Quantum physics provides a way to share keys by transmitting a series of quantum particles, such as particles of light called photons, and performing measurements on them. By comparing notes, the users can be sure that no one else has intercepted the key. Those secret keys, once established, can then be used to encrypt the sensitive intel (SN: 12/13/17). By comparison, standard internet security rests on a relatively shaky foundation of math problems that are difficult for today’s computers to solve, which could be vulnerable to new technology, namely quantum computers (SN: 6/29/17).

But quantum communication typically has a catch. “There cannot be any glitch that is unforeseen,” says quantum physicist Valerio Scarani of the National University of Singapore. For example, he says, imagine that your device is supposed to emit one photon but unknown to you, it emits two photons. Any such flaws would mean that the mathematical proof of security no longer holds up. A hacker could sniff out your secret key, even though the transmission seems secure.

Device-independent quantum key distribution can rule out such flaws. The method builds off of a quantum technique known as a Bell test, which involves measurements of entangled particles. Such tests can prove that quantum mechanics really does have “spooky” properties, namely nonlocality, the idea that measurements of one particle can be correlated with those of a distant particle. In 2015, researchers performed the first “loophole-free” Bell tests, which certified beyond a doubt that quantum physics’ counterintuitive nature is real (SN: 12/15/15).

“The Bell test basically acts as a guarantee,” says Jean-Daniel Bancal of CEA Saclay in France. A faulty device would fail the test, so “we can infer that the device is working properly.”

In their study, Bancal and colleagues used entangled, electrically charged strontium atoms separated by about two meters. Measurements of those ions certified that their devices were behaving properly, and the researchers generated a secret key, the team reports in the July 28 Nature.

Typically, quantum communication is meant for long-distance dispatches. (To share a secret with someone two meters away, it would be easier to simply walk across the room.) So Scarani and colleagues studied entangled rubidium atoms 400 meters apart. The setup had what it took to produce a secret key, the researchers report in the same issue of Nature. But the team didn’t follow the process all the way through: The extra distance meant that producing a key would have taken months.

In the third study, published in the July 29 Physical Review Letters, researchers wrangled entangled photons rather than atoms or ions. Physicist Wen-Zhao Liu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and colleagues also demonstrated the capability to generate keys, at distances up to 220 meters. This is particularly challenging to do with photons, Liu says, because photons are often lost in the process of transmission and detection.

Loophole-free Bell tests are already no easy feat, and these techniques are even more challenging, says physicist Krister Shalm of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. “The requirements for this experiment are so absurdly high that it’s just an impressive achievement to be able to demonstrate some of these capabilities,” says Shalm, who wrote a perspective in the same issue of Nature.

That means that the technique won’t see practical use anytime soon, says physicist Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, who was not involved with the research.

Still, device-independent quantum key distribution is “a totally fascinating idea,” Gisin says. Bell tests were designed to answer a philosophical question about the nature of reality — whether quantum physics really is as weird as it seems. “To see that this now becomes a tool that enables something else,” he says, “this is the beauty.” More

Machine learning can get a boost from quantum physics.

On certain types of machine learning tasks, quantum computers have an exponential advantage over standard computation, scientists report in the June 10 Science. The researchers proved that, according to quantum math, the advantage applies when using machine learning to understand quantum systems. And the team showed that the advantage holds up in real-world tests.

“People are very excited about the potential of using quantum technology to improve our learning ability,” says theoretical physicist and computer scientist Hsin-Yuan Huang of Caltech. But it wasn’t entirely clear if machine learning could benefit from quantum physics in practice.

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In certain machine learning tasks, scientists attempt to glean information about a quantum system — say a molecule or a group of particles — by performing repeated experiments, and analyzing data from those experiments to learn about the system.

Huang and colleagues studied several such tasks. In one, scientists aim to discern properties of the quantum system, such as the position and momentum of particles within. Quantum data from multiple experiments could be input into a quantum computer’s memory, and the computer would process the data jointly to learn the quantum system’s characteristics.

The researchers proved theoretically that doing the same characterization with standard, or classical, techniques would require exponentially more experiments in order to learn the same information. Unlike a classical computer, a quantum computer can exploit entanglement — ethereal quantum linkages — to better analyze the results of multiple experiments.

But the new work goes beyond just the theoretical. “It’s crucial to understand if this is realistic, if this is something we could see in the lab or if this is just theoretical,” says Dorit Aharonov of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who was not involved with the research.

So the researchers tested machine learning tasks with Google’s quantum computer, Sycamore (SN: 10/23/19). Rather than measuring a real quantum system, the team used simulated quantum data, and analyzed it using either quantum or classical techniques.

Quantum machine learning won out there, too, even though Google’s quantum computer is noisy, meaning errors can slip into calculations. Eventually, scientists plan to build quantum computers that can correct their own errors (SN: 6/22/20). But for now, even without that error correction, quantum machine learning prevailed. More