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What is quantum theory of consciousness?

The quantum theory of consciousness is a theoretical approach that seeks to explain the relationship between consciousness and the principles of quantum mechanics. It suggests that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe, and that the principles of quantum mechanics play a crucial role in its functioning.

At its core, the quantum theory of consciousness suggests that consciousness arises from the quantum mechanical interactions between particles in the brain. According to this theory, the brain is not simply a classical, deterministic system, but rather a quantum system that is governed by the principles of quantum mechanics. These principles, which include concepts such as entanglement, superposition, and wave-particle duality, allow for a much more complex and dynamic system than classical mechanics.

One of the key ideas behind the quantum theory of consciousness is the concept of nonlocality. Nonlocality refers to the idea that particles can become instantaneously connected. Even if separated by vast distances. This concept became observed in numerous experiments. And considered to be a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. The theory suggests that consciousness arises from these nonlocal interactions between particles in the brain, and that this allows for a kind of information processing that is not possible in classical systems.

While the quantum theory of consciousness remains a controversial and speculative area of research, it has gained increasing attention from both scientists and philosophers. Proponents of the theory argue that it provides a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of consciousness, and that it has the potential to shed light on a range of phenomena, from near-death experiences to telepathy. However, critics argue that the theory is not supported by empirical evidence, and that it relies on vague and poorly defined concepts.

In conclusion, the quantum theory of consciousness is a theoretical approach that seeks to explain the relationship between consciousness and the principles of quantum mechanics. It suggests that consciousness arises from the interactions between particles in the brain, and that the principles of quantum mechanics play a crucial role in its functioning. While the theory remains controversial, it has the potential to provide a more comprehensive understanding of consciousness and its place in the universe.

Is particle physics the same as quantum?

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What is quantum theory of consciousness? - Rebellion Research

Imperial physicists conducted the double-splitting experiment over time, using materials that could change optical properties in femtoseconds, providing insights into the nature of light and paving the way for advanced materials that could control light in both space and time.

Imperial physicists recreated the famous double-splitting experiment, which showed that light behaves as a particle and wave in time rather than space.

In an amazing development,[{ attribute=>Imperial College London physicists have recreated the historic double-slit experiment, which demonstrated light behaving as both particles and a wave, in time rather than space. By using materials that can alter their optical properties in femtoseconds, the team successfully fired light through a thin film of indium-tin-oxide, creating temporal slits for light to pass through. The experiment not only offers insights into the fundamental nature of light but also serves as a stepping stone for developing advanced materials to control light in both space and time. These materials could potentially contribute to new technologies and help study fundamental physics phenomena, such as black holes.

The experiment relies on materials that can change their optical properties in fractions of a second, which could be used in new technologies or to explore fundamental questions in physics.

The original double-slit experiment, performed in 1801 by Thomas Young at the Royal Institution, showed that light acts as a wave. Further experiments, however, showed that light actually behaves as both a wave and as particles revealing its quantum nature.

These experiments had a profound impact on quantum physics, revealing the dual particle and wave nature of not just light, but other particles including electrons, neutrons, and whole atoms.

Now, a team led by Imperial College London physicists has performed the experiment using slits in time rather than space. They achieved this by firing light through a material that changes its properties in femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), only allowing light to pass through at specific times in quick succession.

Lead researcherProfessor Riccardo Sapienza, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: Our experiment reveals more about the fundamental nature of light while serving as a stepping-stone to creating the ultimate materials that can minutely control light in both space and time.

Details of the experiment are published today (April 3, 2023) in the journal Nature Physics.

Project member Romain Tirole adjusts the equipment used in the study at Imperial College London. Credit: Thomas Angus, Imperial College London

The original double-slit setup involved directing light at an opaque screen with two thin parallel slits in it. Behind the screen was a detector for the light that passed through.

To travel through the slits as a wave, light splits into two waves that go through each slit. When these waves cross over again on the other side, they interfere with each other. Where peaks of the wave meet, they enhance each other, but where a peak and a trough meet, they cancel each other out. This creates a striped pattern on the detector of regions of more light and less light.

Light can also be parcelled up into particles called photons, which can be recorded hitting the detector one at a time, gradually building up the striped interference pattern. Even when researchers fired just one photon at a time, the interference pattern still emerged, as if the photon split in two and travelled through both slits.

In the classic version of the experiment, light emerging from the physical slits changes its direction, so the interference pattern is written in the angular profile of the light. Instead, the time slits in the new experiment change the frequency of the light, which alters its colour. This created colours of light that interfere with each other, enhancing and cancelling out certain colours to produce an interference-type pattern.

The material the team used was a thin film of indium-tin-oxide, which forms most mobile phone screens. The material had its reflectance changed by lasers on ultrafast timescales, creating the slits for light. The material responded much quicker than the team expected to the laser control, varying its reflectivity in a few femtoseconds.

The material is a metamaterial one that is engineered to have properties not found in nature. Such fine control of light is one of the promises of metamaterials, and when coupled with spatial control, could create new technologies and even analogues for studying fundamental physics phenomena like black holes.

Co-authorProfessor Sir John Pendrysaid: The double time slits experiment opens the door to a whole new spectroscopy capable of resolving the temporal structure of a light pulse on the scale of one period of the radiation.

The team next want to explore the phenomenon in a time crystal, which is analogous to an atomic crystal, but where the optical properties vary in time.

Co-authorProfessor Stefan Maiersaid: The concept of time crystals has the potential to lead to ultrafast, parallelized optical switches.

Reference: Double-slit time diffraction at optical frequencies by Romain Tirole, Stefano Vezzoli, Emanuele Galiffi, Iain Robertson, Dries Maurice, Benjamin Tilmann, Stefan A. Maier, John B. Pendry and Riccardo Sapienza, 3 April 2023, Nature Physics.DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-01993-w

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Physicists reveal the quantum nature of light in a new dimension - The Pilot

OAKLAND, Calif March 31 (Reuters) - Singapore-based software startup Horizon Quantum Computing on Friday said it raised $18.1 million to expand its engineering team and speed up product development.

The company, founded in 2018, created a programming language called Helium for quantum computers, designed to make it easier to tackle complex problems.

Today to use quantum computers developers either have to program in terms of elementary operations, or instead rely on pre-written programs from other software makers, said Horizon Chief Executive Joe Fitzsimons.

Quantum computers, based on quantum physics, could potentially perform some calculations millions of times faster than the current fastest super computers. But they are mostly still in research mode and have yet to create an advantage over classic computers for anything significant.

While there are over an estimated 100 million software developers, Fitzsimons said there are only a few hundred who would be able to program quantum computers from scratch, and that banks and pharmaceutical companies will want to develop their own code rather than rely on pre-written ones.

"In some sense their algorithms are part of their competitive edge. So how do you enable them to do that development while recognizing that the talent pool is very, very, very small for this area?" said Fitzsimons.

To help alleviate the talent shortage, the company plans to create a translation layer that will make it possible for software developers using classical computer programming languages such as C++ or Python to use those languages for quantum computers directly.

Horizon Quantum Computing said it is also planning to open its first European offices in Ireland, where it is building its new engineering center.

The company said Sequoia Capital India, China's Tencent Holdings Ltd (0700.HK), and Singapore government's tech investment firm SGInnovate were among the investors funding this round. The company has so far raised a total of about $21 million.

Reporting By Jane Lanhee LeeEditing by Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Thomson Reuters

Reports on global trends in computing from covering semiconductors and tools to manufacture them to quantum computing. Has 27 years of experience reporting from South Korea, China, and the U.S. and previously worked at the Asian Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires and Reuters TV. In her free time, she studies math and physics with the goal of grasping quantum physics.

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MIT undergraduates are learning about nanoscale science and engineering from individual atoms up to full-scale functional systems, and theyre doing it hands-on at MIT.nano.

In class 6.2540 (Nanotechnology: From Atoms to Systems) students spend over nine weeks inside MIT.nanos labs, learning basic skills that allow them to apply their knowledge of the nanoscale to design and build spectrometers, make quantum dots, fabricate light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and tunneling chemical sensors, and test and package their sensors into active displays and systems.

Bringing the science to life in this way has generated much excitement among the undergraduates. Dahlia Dry, a senior majoring in physics, said her faculty advisor suggested the class would show her the fun in quantum mechanics. He was right. This class was exactly what middle-school-aged me thought MIT would be like, in all the best ways, she says.

Word must be getting out about the fun as the class is drawing interest from undergraduates majoring in many different subjects. In fall 2022, six academic departments were represented by the 23 students enrolled.

This class is quintessentially an MIT class, says Neil Deshmukh, an EECS junior. Since coming to campus, I've always wanted to take a class where we were free to build nearly any idea, with access to state-of-the-art equipment and amazing instructors. In 6.2540, that's exactly what we did, and it was one of the best experiences I've had.

The class is taught by three EECS professors: Farnaz Niroui, the EE Landsman Career Development Assistant Professor; Rajeev Ram, professor of electrical engineering; and Tayo Akinwande, the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

In this class we take a design approach, rather than the more common abstract and theoretical style, explains Niroui. We teach the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and nanoscale science by directly relating them to the design and engineering of diverse technologies.

For this reason, the lectures are closely integrated with design projects and weekly lab modules. Starting the very first week, the students are inside the lab, learning to work in a cleanroom and acquiring the basic nanofabrication, processing, and characterization skills to investigate and implement concepts they have learned in the lectures from fundamental science to material synthesis, device design, and full systems integration.

Rather than watching staff run the equipment, the undergraduates do the work themselves using simplified engineering and fabrication flows. This was the most fascinating class I have taken at MIT, and that's despite it being in an area that I knew nothing about beforehand, says EECS sophomore Eric Zhang. It opened my eyes to an entire research and engineering field that I would never have known about otherwise.

6.2540 Nanotechnology: From Atoms to Systems

Each weeks lab work builds off the ones before, starting at the nano- and micro-level and building up to full-scale devices. Students learn about light-matter interactions and build their own microscopes and spectrometers, then use their new tools to characterize the materials and devices they make throughout the term. Further into the semester, they investigate the power of quantum mechanics and the design of nanomaterials through chemical synthesis of quantum dots, tuning their emission color by controlling their size. The following week, they use quantum dots to design and make an LED. This lab is followed by design and fabrication of a quantum tunneling chemical sensor based on graphene-polymer composites. In the final lab, the students use these LEDs and tunneling sensors to integrate a pixelated LED display into a handheld sensor-display system.

For their end-of-semester projects, the students split into teams to design and build something entirely from scratch, provided their idea uses the science, materials, and techniques covered in the class and has at least one feature smaller than 100 nanometers. In the fall 2022 semester, the undergraduates fabricated memristors for next-generation unconventional computing; nature-inspired structured lenses to improve LED efficiency; flexible graphene supercapacitors for solar energy storage; a flexible pulse oximeter; tandem solar cells based on band-gap engineering; and a transistor using atomically-thin 2D materials.

In addition to hands-on experience using tools for nanoscale engineering inside MIT.nanos cleanroom and other labs, 6.2540 provides the opportunity for undergraduates to present at the Microsystems Annual Research Conference (MARC), co-sponsored by the Microsystems Technology Laboratories and MIT.nano. The long-standing event, which brings together over 200 MIT faculty, students, and industry partners each year, traditionally features graduate-level research.

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Image from simulation of ice XVIII. Oxygen ions (red) occupy a regular crystal lattice, while protons (white) diffuse like a liquid. Credit: Maurice de Koning & Filipe Matusalm

A key aspect of the study was the deployment of density functional theory (DFT), a method derived from quantum mechanics and used in solid-state physics to resolve complex crystalline structures.

Researchers used density functional theory to study the mechanical properties of superionic ice, or ice XVIII, a crystalline phase of water believed to make up a large portion of ice giants Neptune and Uranus. In this phase, negative oxygen ions form a lattice while positive hydrogen ions form a liquid within it, similar to a metal conductor. Superionic ice only exists under extreme temperatures and pressure and is believed to contribute to the misalignment of the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus. The team used computational techniques including neural networks and machine learning to understand how deformations in ice XVIII influenced phenomena observed on these planets.

Ordinary everyday ice, like the ice produced by a fridge, is known to scientists as hexagonal ice (ice Ih), and is not the only crystalline phase of water. More than 20 different phases are possible. One of them, called superionic ice or ice XVIII, is of particular interest, among other reasons, because it is thought to make up a large part of Neptune and Uranus, planets frequently referred to as ice giants.

In the superionic crystalline phase, water loses its molecular identity (H2O): negative oxygen ions (O2-) crystallize into an extensive lattice, and protons in the form of positive hydrogen ions (H+) form a liquid that floats around freely within the oxygen lattice.

The situation can be compared to a metal conductor such as copper, with the big difference that positive ions form the crystal lattice in the metal, and electrons bearing a negative charge are free to wander around the lattice, said Maurice de Koning, a professor at the State University of Campinass Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute (IFGW-UNICAMP) in So Paulo state, Brazil.

De Koning led the study that resulted in an article publishedin Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and featured on the coverof its November 8, 2022 issue.

Superionic ice forms at extremely high temperatures in the range of 5,000 kelvins (4,700 C) and pressure of around 340 gigapascals, or over 3.3 million times Earths standard atmospheric pressure, he explained. It is therefore impossible for stable superionic ice to exist on our planet.

It can exist on Neptune and Uranus, however. In fact, scientists are confident that large amounts of ice XVIII lurk deep in their mantles, thanks to the pressure resulting from these giants huge gravitational fields, as confirmed by seismographic readings.

The electricity conducted by the protons through the oxygen lattice relates closely to the question of why the axis of the magnetic field doesnt coincide with the rotation axis in these planets. Theyre significantly misaligned, in fact, De Koning said.

Measurements made by the space probe Voyager 2, which flew by these distant planets on its journey to the edge of the Solar System and beyond, show that the axes of Neptunes and Uranuss magnetic fields form angles of 47 degrees and 59 degrees with their respective rotation axes.

Experiments and simulations

On Earth, an experiment reportedin Nature in 2019 succeeded in producing a tiny amount of ice XVIII for 1 nanosecond (a billionth of a second), after which the material disintegrated. The researchers used laser-driven shock waves to compress and heat liquid water.

According to the paper in Nature, six high-power laser beams were fired in a temporally tailored sequence to compress a thin water layer encapsulated between two diamond surfaces. The shock waves reverberated between the two stiff diamonds to achieve a homogeneous compression of the water layer resulting in the superionic crystalline phase for an extremely short time.

In this latest study, we didnt perform a real physical experiment but used computer simulations to investigate the mechanical properties of ice XVIII and find out how its deformations influence the phenomena seen to occur on Neptune and Uranus, De Koning said.

A key aspect of the study was the deployment of density functional theory (DFT), a method derived from quantum mechanics and used in solid-state physics to resolve complex crystalline structures. First of all, we investigated the mechanical behavior of a flawless phase, which doesnt exist in the real world. We then added defects to see what kinds of macroscopic deformations resulted, he explained.

Crystal defects are typically point defects characterized by ion vacancies or intrusion of ions from other materials into the crystal lattice. Not so in this case. De Koning was referring to linear defects known as dislocations, which are due to angular differences between adjacent layers resulting in puckering somewhat like a rumpled rug.

In crystal physics, dislocation was postulated in 1934 but first observed experimentally in 1956. Its a type of defect that explains a great many phenomena. We say dislocation is to metallurgy what DNA is to genetics, De Koning said.

In the case of superionic ice, the sum of dislocations produces shear, a macroscopic deformation familiar to mineralogists, metallurgists, and engineers. In our study, we calculated, among other things, how much its necessary to force the crystal for it to break up owing to shear, De Konig said.

To this end, the researchers had to consider a relatively large cell of the material with about 80,000 molecules. The calculations entailed extremely heavy and sophisticated computational techniques, including neural networks, machine learning, and the composition of various configurations based on DFT.

This was a most interesting aspect of the study, integrating knowledge in metallurgy, planetology, quantum mechanics, and high-performance computing, he said.

Reference: Plastic deformation of superionic water ices by Filipe Matusalem, Jssica Santos Rego and Maurice de Koning, 2 November 2022, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203397119

The study was supported by FAPESP via a postdoctoral fellowshipawarded to the first author, Filipe Matusalm de Souza, under De Konings supervision; a Thematic Projectled by Alex Antonelli, a researcher at UNICAMP; and the Center for Computing in Engineering and Sciences(CCES), funded under the aegis of FAPESPProgram forResearch, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs).

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Unlocking the Mysteries of Superionic Ice: Deciphering the Magnetic ... - SciTechDaily