Physicists Aim to Classify All Possible Phases of Matter
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Totally amazed at the level of this quantamagazine article. Superb stuff. They even manage to explain string-nets. I keep thinking that you could make an interesting iPhone game out of this.
Actually it's nice to read a bit of a summary of the field, including the history.
Here is another good article discussing the open problem of the existence of a quantum memory [1]. The story goes like this: your hard-drive stores bits of information in little magnets. That is magnetic order, which falls into the symmetry-breaking paradigm discussed in the article. When you turn the computer off, it remembers what's on your harddrive. Those magnets keep the bits protected, by virtue of the "magnetic order". Now here's the question: can we do the same thing with quantum bits? Even theoretically, is it possible? Is there some kind of "quantum ordered system" that will protect a qubit?
Weird analogy. The computer doesn't remember – the individual storage units on a hard drive don't care whether the machine around them has power or not They are indifferent to what's going on in the system which contains them as opposed to, say, the storage units in DRAM. Are you trying to say that at the moment all qubits we've made behave like the storage units in DRAM? In other words, while the system that contains them is powered on they remain in the same state but when the power is removed they become disordered? Aren't qubits an abstraction? I mean, qubit : bit :: qubit storage unit X : harddrive bit – or – qubit : bit :: qubit storage unit Y : DRAM bit – see what I mean?
source: my advisor works on passive error correction
A Rechargeable Spin Battery
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/4/e1602531
More broadly is the emerging field of "Materials Informatics". Roughly ML algorithms applied to the search of stable new materials phases. As well as the processes required to create them.
Machine learning in materials informatics: recent applications and prospects
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-017-0056-5
Quantum Espresso: an integrated suite of Open-Source computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale
I never heard about something similar with the other phases ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
Is that about right?
Essentially, even if interaction is taking place, the hope is that such a regular and patterned formation could keep the qbits you care about, in perfect shape. There may be other interacting factors that oscillate but they are not used for storage, just for nonvolatility.
> "In the last three decades, condensed matter physicists have discovered a wonderland of exotic new phases of matter: emergent, collective states of interacting particles that are nothing like the solids, liquids and gases of common experience."
Stripped of most everything, the sentence reduces to "Physicists have discovered a wonderland".
I'm almost wishing I could embed a graphic. It's been a while since I've diagrammed the grammar of a sentence. I wonder if students are still being taught how to do that. As an exercise, more for myself than what I actually think you need, I'll just do the rest:
- What kind of physicists? Condensed matter physicists.
- When have the physicists discovered this wonderland? In the last three decades.
- A wonderland of what? Of exotic new phases of matter.
- What are these new phases like? They're emergent, collective states of interacting particles that are nothing like the solids, liquids and gases of common experience.
I hope that was the sentence you were referring to :)
I would have written “condensed-matter” with a hyphen to make it more obvious that it’s being used as an adjective.
The physics dept of any university should have a condensed matter subgroup, both theory and experimental.
(FYI - I did my PhD in experimental condensed matter physics).