UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES

Storing quantum bits of information, or qubits, is a lot harder than storing ordinary binary digits. It’s not simply ones or zeroes, but the whole range of subtle quantum superpositions between them. Electrons can easily slide out of those states if they’re not stored in the right materials, which is why electrical engineers at Princeton are working with a UK manufacturer to create a better storage material — synthetic diamonds — from scratch. They published an account of their success on Thursday in Science.

For decades, physicists, materials engineers, and others have been trying to achieve the conceptual promise of quantum-encrypted communications because the data transferred in that process is theoretically immune to covert surveillance. Any attempt to observe that data between parties — à la the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle — would fundamentally alter that information, quickly revealing that it was compromised. The problem has been storing and preserving qubits and then converting them to fiber optic-ready photons, and using diamonds appears to be the route toward achieving both. But not just any diamond will do, which is why Princeton’s team has been hard at work creating a synthetic one, as they describe in their paper.

“The properties that we’re targeting are what’s relevant for quantum networks,” electrical engineer Nathalie de Leon tells Inverse. At Princeton, where de Leon is an assistant professor, her team’s focus is essentially inventing quantum hardware. “It’s applications where you want something that has a long storage time, and then also has a good interface with photons so that you can send light over very long distances.”

Quantum information storage in the diamonds

One of the Element Six diamonds that Princeton University researchers are using for quantum information storage.

Photonic interactions matter a lot for high-speed international communications because all of the information traveling along fiber optic cables moves through our global infrastructure as discrete photons — cruising at 69 percent of the speed of light. (Nice.)

“That puts a lot of constraints on the optical characteristics,” de Leon says. “As one example, it’s really important that the color be stable. If the color of the photon is jumping around over time, then that’s really bad for these protocols.”

Right now, de Leon’s group is trying to craft a version of these synthetic diamonds that can convert to the standard 1,550-nanometer wavelength on which photons now traverse fiber optic cables. Currently, her team’s synthetic diamonds support 946-nanometer photon wavelengths. (Photon “color” is a bit of a euphemism here since both of these wavelengths are shades of infrared outside the visible spectrum.)

The hurdle that her team just succeeded in crossing is storing those qubits in crystalline quantum repeaters, similar to the repeaters that are currently used to prevent signal loss and degradation in today’s fiber-optic communications. The critical step in this process was producing synthetic diamonds with as little unwanted impurities as possible (nitrogen, mainly) and more of the impurities they actually did want (silicon and boron).

“Nitrogen turns out to be the predominant defect that you get in these diamonds,” de Leon says. Her group’s partners at the British diamond maker Element Six had to create above-average vacuum conditions since even ordinary vacuums can leave enough nitrogen in the chamber to contaminate the artificially-made crystals. Because nitrogen has one more free electron than carbon, nitrogen impurities disturb the unique electrical makeup that the researchers are hoping for.

diamonds

Synthetic diamonds, if formulated correctly, could safely store and preserve qubits.

Other small defects can undermine the qubit-storing potential of these diamonds, too. The goal is to have pairs of atom-sized vacancies in the crystal framework alongside a substituted silicon atom where a single carbon used to be, but sometimes those pairs can bunch up together in “vacancy clusters” that start to redistribute their electrons in annoying, counterproductive ways. Sometimes polishing and etching damage on the surface of the diamond can also cause a domino effect, messing with this pattern of electrons, too. This is where adding boron — which has one less free electron than carbon — can help.

“What we had to do,” de Leon says, “is both start with this ultra-high purity diamond and then grow in some boron to basically soak up any of the extra electrons that we couldn’t control. Then there was a lot of materials processing — boring stuff like thermal annealing and repairing the surface at the end to make sure that we still get rid of a lot of these other types of defects that give you extra charges.”

Mastering both of these challenges, many in the field suspect, are the keys to fully functional and nearly impossible to crack quantum encryption.

photonic crystal fibres, quantum information applications, Adelaide

Other researchers have been working with "photonic crystal fibres" for quantum information applications, like Professor Andre Luiten at the University of Adelaide whose device is pictured above.

Before the dawn of synthetic diamonds only a few years ago, researchers in the field of quantum optics had to rely on natural diamonds to do their work — one specific diamond, in particular.

According to de Leon, everyone in the field of quantum optics had to rely on a single, naturally-made diamond from Russia that just happened to have the right percentage of boron, nitrogen, and other impurities to make their research possible. Fragments of the diamond were cleaved off and distributed to research groups across the world.

“Many of the groups had their own little piece of the ‘magic’ Russian diamond,” as de Leon told Princeton’s in-house news service in 2016. “At Harvard, we called ours ‘Magic Alice’ and ‘Magic Bob.’”

So, TL;DR, Western scientists are getting better at manufacturing their own magical quantum computing diamonds instead of depending on slivers of Russia’s magical quantum computing diamond. This is a factual sentence that sounds ridiculous. Classic 2018.

“On a summer’s afternoon, in either 1948 or 1949, my mother, Brenda, was walking with our dog and myself in the area we called simply ‘The Field’ at the back of our housing estate… in what was then the outskirts of Chippenham in Wiltshire [England]. Whilst there, she saw an unusual, occupied aircraft…”

So began a handwritten letter addressed to this author. Tidy and succinct, it documented a mother and daughter’s close encounter with a peculiar flying object, piloted by apparently non-human beings. Many years later, the daughter, Karen, a mere toddler at the time of the incident, solicited from her mother, Brenda, a detailed description of what they had both witnessed that day, making a written record of her response. Brenda had no trouble in recalling the details:

We were walking through ‘The Field’ when this aircraft came out of nowhere and stopped nearby. There were two beings inside, sat facing one another. The aircraft was like a boat with a see-though cover. The two beings inside were neat and compact; they were dressed in grey and had helmets with a sort of crest on top. They were looking towards us, then one of them raised a hand as if he were waving. Then the aircraft just went.

Through further conversation with her mother, Karen was able to establish that:

There was no accompanying sound or scent with the aircraft; that it was in view for no more than three minutes; it was about nine feet long and stopped approximately fifteen yards away at bungalow-roof height; there were no trains on the track nearby at the time; and the area was otherwise deserted.

Their dog, incidentally, “was interested in the aircraft, but was not alarmed.”

Regarding her nondescript recounting of the object’s departure, beyond stating that “it just went,” Brenda had difficulty expressing the character of its movement. “She said that it didn’t exactly vanish instantly, it just ‘went’ very rapidly,” Karen related.

Brenda’s sketch of the object and occupants.

Speaking with her by telephone, I found Karen to be charming and genuine, an intelligent and well-spoken woman whose bewilderment at the described event was evident nearly sixty years on. What, then, to make of her story?

It was clear to me that Karen had no prior interest in UFOs and no UFOlogical knowledge of which to speak, and at no time had she or her mother sought to publicize their experience. Indeed, the witnesses’ names as written here—”Brenda” and “Karen”—are pseudonyms, a reflection of Karen’s continuing desire for anonymity (their real names and backgrounds are known to me).

During our telephone conversation, Karen told me that her mother had always been a “no nonsense” sort of lady and had been reluctant to speculate about the precise nature of the “aircraft,” or about the possible origin of its occupants. Sadly, Brenda passed away a few years ago, but despite her apparent nonchalance at what she and her daughter had witnessed, she had always acknowledged the high-strangeness of the event. “She said that she realized that what she was seeing was ‘something very different,’” Karen wrote in her letter, “but she wasn’t alarmed or afraid. She felt the beings were friendly.”

A map drawn by Karen of the location of the UFO encounter.

Karen’s account is significant in that it documents a rare British Close Encounter of the Third Kind (in which a UFO is seen within 500 feet and occupants are visible) in the very early years of the flying saucer enigma—before descriptions of saucer occupants became commonplace in the literature with the dawning of the contactee movement just a few years later. It is cases like Karen’s that I find interesting—much more so than the now traditional contactee or abductee narratives.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, literally hundreds of accounts of interstellar or interdimensional interlopers began to surface all around the globe—cases that make a mockery of expectation; cases in which entities of all shapes and sizes (though typically humanoid) would show up, day or night, usually outdoors, in the vicinity of a low-hovering or landed “craft.” These entities would sometimes acknowledge their witnesses from afar or even face-to-face, engaging in communication that ranged from incomprehensible and absurd to profoundly philosophical. More often than not, though, the beings in in these “fleeting greeting” cases seemed to be hurrying about their business—making repairs, taking samples from their immediate environment, and occasionally engaging in acts of apparent absurdity (like waving at the witness or giving them pancakes, for example) before bustling back into their bizarre looking contraptions and exiting the scene in the blink of an eye, leaving the observer in a state of bewilderment. Some 300 cases along these lines are documented in the 1969 book The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen, which is an essential read for any self-respecting UFO buff.

The question is—and it’s a question that’s been asked many times over the years—why are there relatively few cases of this nature reported today? It’s a question I could spend a very long time trying to answer, citing the work of theorists from Jacques Vallée and Terrence McKenna, to George P. Hansen and Greg Bishop. Is the cause of close-encounter entity reports a result purely of the comings and goings of “alien” intelligences and technologies, or is it the result of something far closer to home—something in us, something intrinsic to the human experience that morphs across time and culture? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between; somewhere in the realm of co-creation, in which the perceptual apparatus of the human observer plays a fundamental role in the manifestation of the phenomena observed? It’s phenomenological food for thought, and it seems likely we’ll be chewing on it for a very long time to come.