Since July 2017 I have been writing a newsletter on quantum technologies. Until 2020 this has been roughly monthly, while now it’s a much more sporadic event. It is a brief summary of what I see happening in research, technology transfer, plus some bonus links. You can subscribe here to be part of the mailing list. The past editions are also hosted on Medium. Below you can find about topics I write about more extensively.
Entropia – Wisdom of Uncertainty
I’ve written this text as part of an art-science project with photographer Frank Stelitano. You can find more details of the Wisdom of Uncertainty exhibition here and here. Entropia e energia L’entropia è disordine. L’entropia è irreversibile. Sono le uova che si rompono nella confezione. È la goccia di inchiostro che si dissolve nella tazza…
Quantum Jungle
It’s been a long, dense year and I hope you all are doing fine. Not only March 2021 marks one year from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic escalation, but for me, it also marks the beginning of the adventure at Unitary Fund, the non-profit organization working to make the quantum tech ecosystem as open as possible.…
Gravitational Quantum Sensors
LIGO and Virgo, the joint gravitational wave consortia and related detector complexes, based, respectively, in the USA (Washington State and Louisiana) and in Europe (Italy), can now measure more subtle gravitational episodes thanks to a quantum optics improvement in their devices. A gravitational wave detector is a huge interferometer (stretching along a few kilometers), not…
Quantum Advantage
A research paper has been published in Nature detailing Google’s quantum supremacy experiment. Link The idea of quantum supremacy is to find a testbed where quantum computers outperform classical computers. In the specific case, the calculation was very much related to the theory of quantum computing itself: not only the calculation is performed with a quantum computer, but…
Analog Computing
There is an unconventional kind of computing that is being investigated in research centers and academic spin-offs around the world. It is not the standard way of doing calculations with a digital computer. It rather relies on a mapping between the purported capability of a physical system to solve a given problem natively and the…
Quantum Internet
To obtain a truly ‘quantum internet’ we will need to develop specific hardware and deploy an infrastructure that can store and broadcast quantum information across a quantum network. Why would we want such a thing? Two main reasons are quantum-secure information sharing and applications of quantum computing capabilities. The vision for a quantum internet dates…
Quantum Games
Games are fun. They are also an effective way to learn. As everyone knows, they can rapidly become addictive. These features have been exploited by researchers to advance toward the solution of outstanding scientific problems. An example of gamification at the service of science is Fold It, an unexpected long-lived success story. Invented to crowd-source computational…
Open-Source Quantum Tech
There is a general trend in academia: the growth of open-source software for open science. Quantum tech is part of this transformation. Open-source code is hosted on freely reachable online repositories, such as Github, and distributed for everyone to tweak it and build upon it. Often this happens in a collaborative way, and it can…
Quantum Machine Learning
2017, the boom of quantum machine learning: Although the first quantum algorithms for machine learning have been proposed as far back as in the late 90s, this research subfield is now attracting an ever increasing interest from the quantum tech research community. As several articles on the topic are uploaded each week, there is an…
Space Quantum Communication
A team of researchers based in China reported in Science on a milestone in quantum technologies research: the first quantum experiment initiated from a space satellite. Previous space experiments used existing satellites to mirror a signal sent from Earth back to Earth. This time the source of quantum correlation was on board of the satellite, which was…
Nathan Shammah 