Natural Quantum:
Science, Paradigms and Products
Christopher Papile, Ph.D.
BraneCell’s recent visual podcast, found on our home page, features our Director of Marketing and CEO discussing naturally occurring quantum coherence, theories of their meaning and our quest to build an ambient temperature, portable quantum processing unit (QPU).
Over the preceding decades, experimental evidence shows quantum coherence in noisy, biological systems. For example, green anoxygenic (sulfur-using) bacteria exhibit entangled excitons with coherence times that are only moderately reduced, when the entanglement is initiated at liquid nitrogen temperature or room temperature. Photosynthetic bacteria use quantum entanglement as part of their normal physiology; it’s not exotic for them, only exotic for our mindset. Noisy, multi-entanglement, systems are providing us a quantum engineering toolbox, instructive for building ambient temperature quantum computing devices that can address problems beyond the reach of Classical CPU-GPU systems.
In the visual podcast we also look at hydrodynamic quantum analogs, such as walking droplets. Although they are not a complete example of the Pilot Wave theory, the droplet videos are certainly amazing! We touch on David Bohm’s life-long goal (and all of ours) to understand ultimate truth.
Our podcast takes a look at some epistemic models of quantum reality. While that may not sound like a business topic, it has a bearing on the trajectory of BraneCell’s product strategy. Our decentralized QPU technology is core to hardware that will serve the maximum number of customers, just as desk top computers, workstations, etc… have done before. When most other companies are focused on quantum cloud services, the BraneCell ambient quantum computing hardware is a much-needed decentralized product contribution. The world will be a better place, when the new quantum paradigm brings everyone along.
When one looks at some of the beautiful quantum corral images — harmony, at the infinitesimal level comes to mind. This is the cornerstone of the natural, macroscopic world; it rests on beauty. The paradigm brought about by quantum products and science should both fit with the experimental data and lay the foundation for our optimistic shared future.
As Moore’s Law is stagnating, now is the time to step into the new compute landscape, brimming with opportunity and marvels. The acceleration and ease brought to major business functions via classical CPU/GPU cost and speed improvements, known as the economies of Moore’s law, now need renewal. BraneCell works to continue and extend the benefits received from improved information processing technology. We are doing that work with partners including, Allegheny Science & Technology, AST.
AST is a woman-owned technology and energy solutions firm with expertise in applied science and technology, mission assurance and support, and data and decision analytics. AST integrates science and technology to deliver personalized service and trusted solutions for government and commercial clients.
BraneCell is building a coherent hardware-software platform centered on ambient-temperature QPU technology. A QPU is based on a group of physical qubits that can be entangled and manipulated. BraneCell’s technology is focused on this in a practical way. Practical technology and practical operating conditions that provide an accessible product for many. As with the start of classical computing, decades ago, the full extent of the life-improving market applications and possibilities that quantum computing brings, cannot be fully known today. But when we get to an orders-of-magnitude large multi-qubit array — BraneCell’s sea of qubits — with a full set of publically available algorithms, and company-developed quantum routines, we will then set our eyes on things, never seen before.
A couple of practical examples of quantum algorithms are listed here to provide a flavor. These focus on some major industries including: finance, markets, security, search, renewable energy, chemical plants and faster routines for existing business models. For example:
Quantum parallelism provides impressive speedup for database search. Grover’s algorithm finds the target element in an unsorted database quadratically faster than a classical IT system.
Shor showed quantum algorithms that can run in polynomial time for factoring integers and for computing discrete logarithms.
Quantum computing speeds up Monte Carlo methods — an important tool in science, statistical physics, microelectronics and Wall Street style quantitative analysis.
Various quantum analogs of the Black-Scholes formula for the price of financial variables have been looked at and are being developed. Mathematical formalisms, which are informed by quantum systems, model difficult-to-forecast stock transformations. A recent review by several EU investigators [arXiv:1807.03890] describes the application of quantum machine learning (QML), related subroutines and their helpful speedup for finance problems. Self-organizing feature maps (SOFM) can provide exponential algorithm speed up…to name a few.
Optimization and data anomaly analysis for renewable energy microgrids, chemical plants, and refineries…molecular modeling, reaction kinetic modeling, scheduling problems…the list goes on.
And amidst these positive business applications, which is BraneCell’s focus, this moment can’t pass without mentioning the recent results by Drs. Chiara Marletto, David Coles, T Farrow and V Vedral published in Journal of Physics Communications. Those results seem to indicate Nature is having a little fun with humanity. Sometimes humanity’s sense of humor seems missing, but Nature has many surprises to make us smile.
The recently reported study looks at an experiment conducted in 2017 by Dr. David Coles from the University of Sheffield and his colleagues. That communication describes the measurement of vacuum Rabi splitting for the two harmonic oscillators in the system (modeled for the light field and the bacteria quantized processes) suggesting that they are entangled. The best explanation presented in the paper is the excitons within the physiology generated by the bacteria photoelectric effect and the photons in the cavity are entangled subsystems.
The experiment seems to indicate that a field of photons, bounced-around photosynthetic bacteria within a small cavity were not merely absorbed/emitted by the bacteria. This field of photons, essentially, became part of the bacteria. Stated another way, the subsystems became “one”. The bacteria’s photosynthetic system became entangled with light inside the cavity, outside of itself. Physics meets philosophy meets products — and we are happy to make this our work.
Join us, at BraneCell, see the quantum world, build a world.
