QUANTUM BATTERY

Quantum is the buzzword in today’s electronics market. As scientists decipher the secrets of the universe’s building block as well as uncover the laws that govern them, we’ve been able to predict and create some stunning pieces of equipment. Today, we look atbatteries that never die.

That’s right, the idea of needing to charge your battery may be a thing of the past. To clarify, this isn’t endless or free energy, so thermodynamics is still a pesky annoyance.

At the moment, all (or, the vast majority) of all mechanical equipment uses classical mechanics; from the battery you use to power your cell phone to the engine you use to drive your car classical mechanics rules the day. In the grand scheme of nature’s laws, those found in classical mechanics are horribly inefficient. These systems work well below the thermodynamic limit, meaning that they usually take far more energy to run than they can produce. Quantum mechanics offers us a way to greatly increase the efficiency of these machines… nature’s cheat codes if you will.

The question here is ‘how much work can be extracted from a quantum system’. We’ve known for ages that it’s possible to harvest energy from a selection of quantum states but not all of them. Since the laws that govern anything smaller than my finger get really strange, you can expect that quantum mechanics also has some weird ideas here.

(Very) loosely similar to potential and kinetic energy in classical devises, all of the potential energy in passive quantum states is extractable – meaning you can use that energy to power systems elsewhere. This is where quantum entanglement comes in.

Einstein put it best when he described this peculiar property of quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance.” Here, two or more particles are entangled which means they share the same wave form. The more technical definition is:

“Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons, electrons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and even small diamonds interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description (state), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc.”

When you have a single battery pulling energy from a quantum state, it tends to operate well below the thermodynamic limit. Robert Alicki from the University of Gdansk in Poland and Mark Fannes from the University of Leuven in Belgium managed to demonstrate that entangling quantum batteries together greatly increases their efficiency. So much that the more entangled batteries in a system, the closer they approach the thermodynamic limit. According to the dynamic duo, if you get enough batteries entangled, you become so arbitrarily close to the thermodynamic limit that you can consider the energy exchange ‘almost perfect’ (because, you can’t have a perfect energy exchange without violating thermodynamics).

As always, there is a catch. Their calculations and experimentation doesn’t account for practical limitations of this functionality. It might work perfectly well on a chalkboard in the lab but soon develop some issues in practicality in your pocket. Either way, this is certainly worth investigating.

Google Races Quantum Computer Against Its Own Web Empire

Google’s online empire is known for its speed. The web giant has spent the last decade fashioning a worldwide network of data centers and computer servers with the sole aim of delivering information to your web browser as quickly as possible.

But, at NASA’s Ames Research Center, not far from Google headquarters, there’s a machine that could go even faster. This is the multimillion-dollar quantum computer shared by Google and NASA, and Google engineers are already pitting the thing against the company’s existing hardware and software. It’s a race between the quantum computer and the classic computers.

“We set up a blue team and a red team that race each other,” Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells WIRED. “The blue team throws up new problem classes they believe favor the [quantum] hardware, and the red team refines classical algorithms to match or outperform the hardware.”

Google isn’t ready to publish any results, so it can’t say where the quantum computer is outperforming its more conventional digital computers. But the company is “optimistic that we can find challenges where the [quantum] hardware is superior.”

Built by a Canadian company called D-Wave, this quantum machine is one of only two in use around the world. Early research involving the system took a bit of a hit during the government shutdown last month, but things are now back up and running, with both NASA and Google running tests to better understand what the machine is actually capable of doing.

As Google runs its races, NASA is running simulations that could feed the International Space Station project and various supercomputing efforts. It’s an exciting time, says Rupak Biswas, the deputy director of the Exploration Technology Directorate at Ames: the dawn of the quantum computing age.

The D-Wave machine couldn’t be more different from the average computer. The thing won’t work unless it’s shielded from the Earth’s magnetic field. Parts of it get cooled to near absolute zero. And, because it must be carefully calibrated, you need about a month to boot it up. But the inner-workings of the system are still a bit of a mystery, and it’s not even clear whether this creation should be considered a true quantum computer.

With a classical computer — a computer that obeys the laws of everyday physics — information is stored in transistors. A transistor is either on or off. It either holds a one or a zero. But with quantum computing, a bit can be both a one and a zero at the same time, and that means that these computers could become really good at some types of number-crunching tasks. “These are problems of planning and scheduling, or search problems or machine learning: Things that in classical computer science are known as NP-hard because these problems are really difficult problems,” Biswas says.

The D-Wave exhibits some quantum-like properties, and it has been shown to be useful for a certain class of problems, but it’s not good for everything. It’s not what scientists would call a “universal quantum computer.” NASA, like Google, is running some early tests on the computer to better understand what kind of problems it can and cannot solve.

In the future, the space agency says, the machine could help it map out the most efficient way for a Rover mission to explore a new planet, marshaling data from dozens of outer-space observation points. “Let’s say you have all these satellites and you have these rover missions, and you’re trying to plan and schedule that activity. That is an NP-hard problem,” Biswas says.

NASA’s first tests will study techniques for scheduling supercomputer resources — figuring out which supercomputer nodes should be used at what times if you’re running a thousand supercomputing jobs. They’d also like to use the machine to better schedule work on the International Space Station.

Today, NASA solves these kinds of problems using heuristics. “You make some educated guesses and you pare down your search space so that the search space becomes manageable,” says Biswas. That means the space agency may not get definitive answers to its really complex problems.

NASA and Google also want to understand what exactly is happening inside their super-cooled, superconductive supercomputer. Does quantum entanglement occur — when two particles are physically separate, but remain linked at the quantum level? How about quantum tunneling? “Those are also of fundamental interest to the physicists within NASA,” Biswas says. According to Freidenfelds, Google is interested in quantum entanglement as well.

For all of its coolness, the D-Wave system is small by supercomputing standards. And Biswas points out that NASA still doesn’t know if it will deliver on its promise, or even if D-Wave’s approach is the best way to do quantum computing. “We also have to be realistic,” he says. “Just because we’re trying this doesn’t mean we’re going to get a better answer.”

source:http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/quantum_nasa/

Ranets E High Power Microwave Directed Energy Weapon

 

The Ranets E is a High Power Microwave (HPM) weapon system intended to produce electrically lethal damage or disruption and dysfunction in opposing airborne systems, be they aircraft or guided munitions in flight. The system was first disclosed by Rosoboronexport in 2001, but little technical detail has been disclosed since then.

The weapon uses an X-band pulsed 500 MegaWatt HPM source, generating 10 to 20 nanosecond pulses at a 500 Hz PRF, and average output power of 2.5 to 5 kiloWatts. The antenna is large enough to provide a gain of 45 to 50 dB in the X-band, for a total weapon weight of 5 tonnes. The weapon has been described as a "radio-frequency cannon" and Russian sources credit it with a lethal range of 20 miles against the electronic guidance systems of PGMs and aircraft avionic systems. 

The cited lethal range figures are predicated on the assumption that the target is vulnerable to a field strength of the order of ~1.0 kiloVolt/m and the antenna has a gain between 45 and 50 dBi. If we assume target hardness for typical COTS electronics, the lethal radius is between 3.8 and 7.0 nautical miles, if the target hardness is greater, the lethal footprint is reduced accordingly. What is clear is that the Ranets E will be a credible electrically lethal weapon at ranges typical for a terminal point defence weapon weapon.

The product brochure for the weapon shows its deployment on the MAZ-7910 chassis using the 54K6 command post cabin to house the Ranets system, with an roof mounted turntable for the steerable parabolic antenna. Other lower quality illustrations (not reproduced) show the Ranets E vehicle linked via cables to a 85V6 Vega/Orion Emitter Locating System (ELS) used as the targeting element. In the absence of an integrated targeting system on the Ranets E - problematic due to the risk of fratricide as even sidelobes would be electrically lethal at short ranges - it is likely that an operational system would be remotely aimed by another asset. Other than an ELS a SAM system engagement radar with sufficient angular accuracy would be suitable.

The CONOPS for the system would involve attaching one or more Ranets E systems to a battery of SAMs and integrating them with the battery fire control system, such that the Ranets E systems would be cued, aimed and fired remotely.

The APA illustration shows the system deployed on the MZKT-7930 chassis as that is the current production replacement for the original MAZ-7910.

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-PLA-PD-SAM.html