Posted in experimental insights, feeling dumb, humour, physics fail on December 8, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Take a look at this picture:
Yes I am hacksawing a dilution refrigerator….
One of the entry ports to the IVC has been hardsoldered with a stainless steel placeholder bush. We need to replace this with our custom made copper bush with feedthroughs for coaxes and DC lines. It is virtually impossible to remove this part given [...]
Posted in cake, expt vs theory showdown, feeling dumb, quantum computing, quantum spookiness, superconductors on October 20, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Two interesting arXiv papers this week:
Adiabatic quantum computation along quasienergies
A potentially new model of Quantum Computation, which is a discretized variant of Adiabatic Quantum Computation (AQC). Is it equivalent to the standard model? Is it useful? No-one knows.
This paper also got me thinking:
Electronic structure of superposition states in flux qubits.
How do you measure the cattiness [...]
Posted in BCI, RSFQ, feeling dumb, learnin' stuff, quantum computing, superconductors on July 20, 2009 | 12 Comments »
I’m interested in Quantum Neural Networks, specifically how to actually build the things. Any input would be greatly appreciated on this one. This is open notebook science in an extreme sense: I’m discussing here something I’d like to go into eventually, it may be several years down the line, but it’s worth thinking about it [...]
Posted in book reviews, feeling dumb, learnin' stuff on July 5, 2009 | 8 Comments »
This has to be one of my favourite books ever. I’m so embarrassed that I hadn’t read it before now.
The book concentrated on how nanosystems will be used to transform our lives, our bodies, and the environment. There was also a discussion on how we will control nanosystems such that they do not replicate uncontrollably. [...]
Posted in feeling dumb, learnin' stuff, quantum computing on June 13, 2009 | 2 Comments »
On Thursday I attended a seminar by Simon Webster from the Ion trap QC group in Oxford. I didn’t realise that ion trap QC was so advanced. Having spent so much time in the happy world of LSI Josephson logic, I had a prehistoric picture of an ion trap being a large metallic cavity surrounded [...]
Posted in controversial..., feeling dumb, research blogging on January 22, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In my experience, physicists academics aren’t generally very good at meetings.
Yesterday was amazing – it’s the first time I think we’ve had a meeting that was productive! We actually planned it. There was an agenda, several of the participants gave short talks, and I drafted up an action plan and took minutes. The meeting kept [...]
Posted in cool physics, feeling dumb, learnin' stuff, superconductors on January 4, 2009 | 13 Comments »
The Penrose interpretation of quantum mechanics…
…states that the mass of a system affects the system’s ability to maintain quantum coherence. This is the basis for some theories of quantum gravity. Above the Planck mass, which is ~1E-8kg, a system can no longer maintain coherence for any measureable time, due to the onset of gravitational interactions.
This [...]
