APS March Meeting: News Roundup

Greetings from the second day of the APS March Meeting in Boston. Reporters are covering this meeting both onsite and remotely, from their desks. We wanted to highlight some of the articles appearing so far. We’ll have a feature article on a meeting story a little later today.

The New York Times: IBM Researchers Inch Closer on Quantum Computer - the bizarre counterintuitive phenomena of quantum mechanics, which governs the rules of atoms and their constituents, are often very fleeting. This certainly has held true for the building blocks of qubits, the building blocks of high desirable quantum computers. Unlike ordinary binary digital bits, which could be a 0 or 1, qubits could be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This article explains the announcement of a relatively long-lived qubit, based on a superconducting material, which lasts for about 1/10,000th of a second, compared to earlier qubits, which lasted just billionths of a second as of a decade ago.

Nature: Quest for Quirky Quantum Particles May Have Hit Gold - Eugenie Samuel Reich scooped a talk on possible experimental evidence for a long-coveted kind of particle known as a Majorana fermion.

We’ll have more coming up, including a visit to Harvard physics labs and our first feature article from the meeting!