Researchers have demonstrated a new type of computation based on “magic dust” that has the potential to upend the supercomputing future. The dust, which is really composed of quasiparticles known as polaritons, is well-suited finding optimizations for very complex mathematical problems because of its natural propensity for condensation at low energy states. The group’s work is described this week in the journal Nature Materials
“A few years ago our purely theoretical proposal on how to do this was rejected by three scientific journals,” notes Natalia Berloff, the new paper’s lead author and a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, in the aforementioned press release. “One referee said, ‘Who would be crazy enough to try to implement this?!’ So we had to do it ourselves, and now we’ve proved our proposal with experimental data.”
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