An international team of scientists—including researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—has succeeded in storing quantum data in an atomic nucleus for nearly two seconds, then retrieving it for processing.
Although two seconds is a short period, it is thousands of times longer than reported in previous studies and marks a milestone in quantum computing.

Researchers have calculated that if data could be stored in a quantum system for at least one second, error correction could protect the data indefinitely.

As techniques for creating the specialized storage environment improve, retention times could be extended, according to Joel Ager of the Berkeley Lab team.

“The good news is that there are no known physical limits that would prevent quantum memory time in nuclear spin from being longer,” Ager said. “With even greater isotopic and chemical purity of our silicon crystals, we should be able to store data in the nucleus for an arbitrarily long period of time, maybe even in terms of years.”
The achievement was reported in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

The team also included researchers from Princeton University in the United States and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The work was funded in part by the National Security Agency, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department, the parent agency of the Berkeley Lab.
Quantum mechanics offers the possibility of computing power and speed billions of times greater than possible with traditional computers, in which data is stored and processed in digital bits, represented by either a 1 or 0. Quantum bits, or qubits, encode the data in property of subatomic particles called spin, which can be either up or down.
What makes quantum computing potentially so powerful is that a qubit can exist in both states at once. In traditional data, a byte made up of three bits can represent only one of eight possible combinations of 1s and 0s. But a qubyte can represent all eight at once, and operations can be performed simultaneously on all eight.

The challenge in practical quantum computing is to isolate the qubit from the noisy environment and protect it so it can be measured and manipulated. The spin of electrons has proven well-suited to processing quantum data, but is too fragile for memory because data quickly becomes corrupted by other electrons. To overcome this, the researchers moved the data into the nucleus of the atom, which is quieter and more protected than the electron cloud.
The team used phosphorous atoms embedded in specially developed crystals of exceptionally pure silicon-28. This was important, because natural silicon crystals contain 4.7 percent of the isotope silicon-29, which has a nuclear spin that would interfere with the readout of data from the phosphorous, said Berkeley Lab’s Eugene Haller, an authority on crystal growth and purification. The silicon crystals were grown at the Berkeley Lab, where Ager designed and built a one-of-a-kind reactor for the process.
“With crystals painstakingly grown by the Berkeley team and very careful measurements, we were delighted to see memory times exceeding the threshold” of one second, said Steve Lyon, leader of the Princeton team.
The scientists established a state in the electron spin of the phosphorous atom and transferred it to nuclear spin using a combination of microwave and radio frequency pulses. That data was stored in the nucleus spin for 1.75 seconds and then transferred back to the electron spin with about 90 percent accuracy.
“The electron acts as a middle man between the nucleus and the outside world,” said John Morton, research fellow at Oxford’s St. John College and lead author of the article. “It gives us a way to have our cake and eat it—fast processing speeds from the electron and long memory times from the nucleus.”
Future steps in quantum computing will require improving spin control and readout mechanisms, and testing the limits of memory time for nuclear storage.

Program: SBIR
Topic Num: A08-204 (Army)
Title: Multi-Robot Pursuit System
Research & Technical Areas: Ground/Sea Vehicles
Acquisition Program:
Objective: Develop a software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment.
Description: There are many research efforts within robotics in path planning, exploration, and mapping of indoor and outdoor environments. Operator control units are available that allow semi-autonomous map-based control of a team of robots. While the test environments are usually benign, they are slowly becoming longer and more complex. There has also been significant research in the game theory community involving pursuit/evasion scenarios. This topic seeks to merge these research areas and develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject, while minimizing the chances of missing the subject. If the operator is an active member of the search team, the software should minimize the chance that the operator may encounter the subject. As a simplification, the building layout could be given, although operating in an unknown environment with unknown obstacles is more realistic. The latter case should be studied at least in simulation. The software should maintain awareness of line-of-sight, as well as communication and sensor limits. It will be necessary to determine an appropriate sensor suite that can reliably detect human presence and is suitable for implementation on small robotic platforms. Additionally, the robot may not have the intelligence, sensing, or manipulative power to perform reconnaissance under full autonomy. For example, the robot may not be able to negotiate all obstacles, determine the course of action when confronted with difficult choices, or have sufficient team members to optimally search. Part of the research will involve determining what role the human operator will play in the search task. The system should flag the operator when assistance is required. Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.

PHASE I: Develop the system design and determine the required capabilities of the platforms and sensors. Perform initial feasibility experiments, either in simulation or with existing hardware. Documentation of design tradeoffs and feasibility analysis shall be required in the final report.

PHASE II: Implement the software and hardware into a sensor package, integrate the package with a generic mobile robot, and demonstrate the system’s performance in a suitable indoor environment. Deliverables shall include the prototype system and a final report, which shall contain documentation of all activities in this project and a user’s guide and technical specifications for the prototype system.

PHASE III: Robots that can intelligently and autonomously search for objects have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms.

References: 1. http://carmen.sourceforge.net/home.html (Carnegie Mellon Robot Navigation Toolkit).

2. http:// www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~stachnis/pdf/pfaff07irosws.pdf (Navigation in Combined Outdoor and Indoor Environments using Multi-Level Surface Maps).

3. http://cis.jhu.edu/~rvidal/publications/tra01-final.pdf (Probabilistic Pursuit-Evasion Games: Theory, Implementation and Experimental Evaluation).

4. http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/perso/a0/fiorino/public_html/publications/aamas05.ps (Coordinated exploration of unknown labyrinthine environments applied to the Pursuit-Evasion problem).

5. https://drum.umd.edu/dspace/bitstream/1903/7085/1/TR+2007-13+Gehrels.pdf (Pursuit Techniques on Pioneer Robots).

Today, the Department of Defense notified the Congress and the contractor, Bell Helicopter, that it will not certify the U.S. Army Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH) program for continuation.

John Young, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, in consultation with senior Defense and Army officials, has determined that the fundamental cost and schedule basis underlying award of the ARH contract is no longer valid.

The ARH contract was awarded for an expected development cost of $359 million and a procurement average unit cost of $8.56 million. Currently, DoD estimates that development will cost $942 million and the procurement average unit cost will be $14.48 million. Delivery of ARH to the Army was originally scheduled to take place by 2009, but the current projection is for 2013.

“Rather than continue this program”, Young said, “I have decided that the best course of action is to provide the Army with an opportunity to define a coherent, disciplined Kiowa Warrior helicopter replacement program, and to obtain more rigorous contract terms for its development.”

Secretary of the Army Pete Geren stated, “The cost and schedule that were the focus of the decision to award the contract to Bell Helicopter are no longer valid. We have a duty to the Army and the taxpayer to move ahead with an alternative course of action to meet this critical capability for our Soldiers at the best price and as soon as possible.”

See the Details of the Kiowa Reconnaissance Helicopter

Egyptian Doctor Raouf Amin languishes in a Saudi jail and is punished with 70 lashes once a week. Cut off from his family in Egypt, the 52-year-old doctor was convicted for prescribing painkillers to a Saudi princess that led to her addiction.

An appeal court judge ruled that Amin will be beaten weekly until he has received 1,500 lashes – and then he’ll spend another 14 years behind bars.

The judge doubled the original punishment meted out to him a little over one year ago in the lower court where Amin was sentenced to a seven-year jail term with 750 lashes.

Not surprisingly, human rights groups and the Egyptian doctor’s syndicate are outraged.

The Middle East Times was told by a human rights lawyer that Amin was given his first 70 lashes last week and will get 70 more this week.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) and the foreign ministry are taking an earnest look into finding a way to have Amin quickly returned to Egypt.

The doctor, who has lived and worked in the Gulf state for more than 20 years, had been treating the princess for several months for back pains after she visited the hospital in which he worked.

Ahmed Amin, the doctor’s son, who himself was born in Saudi Arabia, claims the woman went into the hospital and specified the medication she wanted.

The woman had been receiving similar treatment in the United States after she had fallen from a horse while riding.

Hafez Abu Saeda, the director of EOHR concurred that the medication Amin had prescribed was the same as the woman had been receiving in the United States, “so it is obvious that the doctor was not at fault for her addiction,” Abu Saeda concluded.

“It is a harsh sentence that really must be looked at,” he said at his Cairo office, flipping through reports on Amin’s case.

Abu Saeda was astounded that the appeal judge gave a stiffer penalty than in the original case. It is tantamount, he said, to penalizing Amin for asserting his right of appeal.

“When you appeal against a sentencing it is the rule that it cannot go higher, but in Saudi Arabia it appears anything is possible.”

Abu Saeda said he has been in contact with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to publicize the jailing.

Also, the Doctor’s Syndicate in Cairo has threatened demonstrations in support of Amin.

On Monday, a small sit-in led by human rights activists and Amin’s son was held in front of the Saudi Embassy in Cairo, as a means of publicizing the sentence.

Their threats have driven the Egyptian foreign ministry to seek a solution, partly out of concern that negative repercussions in Egypt may damage relations between Cairo and Riyadh.

“We have been in contact with the foreign ministry, which has asked us for information and help to end this crisis,” Abu Saeda said, half-laughing at how quickly the government is willing to call on human rights organizations when the case is outside Egypt’s borders.

“This is strange, because if this had happened in Egypt they would be against us; but because it happened in Saudi then it is okay to work with us,” he smiled, cynically.

The Egyptian government and human rights groups have often been at odds over cases in Egypt. And especially in recent months over alleged police torture and brutality that rights groups say is endemic to the country. The state denies these incidents as mainstream, arguing that they are not the rule.

In advising ministry officials, Abu Saeda said his organization is trying to push forward points that are essential to Amin’s defense.

First, he said, Amin was not given a fair trial and this must be stated up front.

And second, the “continuous use of physical punishment is prohibited under international law in these situations and must be discontinued.”

He believes that with pressure, the Saudi government will release Amin and let him return to Egypt, “but pressure must continue. We will not stop our campaign until he is released.”

Both the Egyptian foreign ministry and the Saudi Embassy in Cairo refused to comment on the case, saying the matter is still under investigation.

The foreign ministry would only tell the Middle East Times that they “are working hard to have an Egyptian citizen returned to Egypt in the face of such harsh conditions.”

Amin’s family are grateful for any help they can get and welcome the Egyptian government’s actions as a chance to move forward.

“The last time I saw my father was over a year ago,” Hafez, his son said. “We can’t visit and we can’t get a visa since his residency was dropped. We can’t even talk to him over the phone; there is no connection between us right now.”

Fighting terrorism necessitates a two-pronged approach: covert action by Special Forces and smart intelligence. Covert action is absolutely central to winning the war on terrorism just as it was the decisive instrument of the Cold War, said a senior U.S. intelligence official. Covert action remains a critical instrument in the war on terror.

And it is thanks to a number of covert operations that the United States, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official, has made headway in the “war on terrorism.”

But there is still a long way to go and real threats to counter, particularly as the Afghan insurgency has gotten significantly more intense in the past two years; and in Pakistan the problem has gotten worse over the past decade, substantially worse.

The tribal areas of western Pakistan remain the most significant strategic threat. However the threats do not just emanate out of traditional Muslim lands but, according to a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, those threats “can emanate out of the United Kingdom and other parts of Western Europe, too.

“If you look at the number of threats over the past decade, you would see as many or more coming out of Europe as the Greater Middle East,” said Michael Vickers, assistant secretary for Special Operations and low-intensity conflict at the U.S. Department of Defense.

“Al-Qaida’s goals remain to catalyze an Islamist insurgency, to break up and/or prevent the formation of international coalitions arrayed against it, to exhaust and expel the West from Muslim lands, to overthrow apostate – or what they consider – illegitimate states and to establish a new caliphate, weaken the West, and transform the international balance of power to favor this new caliphate. Rather large ambitions, to say the least,” said the U.S. intelligence official.

But according to the U.S. official, not all is dire: its intelligence services have scored some major points in the global war on terrorism.

“We’ve had some notable successes over the past seven years, and some of these have been gradual and incremental but still quite significant,” said Vickers, who was speaking at the Washington Near East Institute for Policy last week.

Vickers said the progress against international terrorism was mainly in an area in Southeast Asia referred to by the intelligence community as the “terrorist transit triangle.”

Progress in the war on terrorism was particularly strong in the Philippines where headway was made in fighting the Abu Sayyaf group and the Jamaat al-Islamiyya.

Vickers is the senior civilian adviser to both the secretary and the deputy secretary of defense on the operational employment of future capabilities of Special Operations Forces, strategic forces, and conventional forces.

He is a former CIA operations officer, and during the mid-1980s was the principal strategist for the largest covert action program in the CIA’s history – the paramilitary operation that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan.

Vickers said that after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the start of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the United States began to practice “a revolutionary form of unconventional warfare.” This called for combining the U.S.’s most advanced weapons and surveillance equipment with Special Operations to eliminate the threat from al-Qaida.

By the end of this decade or probably early in the next decade, Special Operations Forces will essentially be twice as large as they were at the beginning of the decade. The numbers of Special Forces troops will increase from the current levels of about 15,000 to somewhere around 64,000. The budget for Special Operations Command will more than double in the next year.

Special Forces include Army Special Forces, Green Berets, Rangers, and Navy Seals, as well as a number of classified units. More recently there has been a new Marine Corps Special Operations Command unit.

This is the largest growth in Special Operations Force history. What the United States is building, according to Vickers, is the Special Operations component of the global war on terrorism for the future.

At the moment the United States maintains Special Operations Forces in some 60 countries. The vast majority – 80 percent – of those right now are concentrated in the Greater Middle East or the United States Central Command area of responsibility; the bulk of those of course in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is one of the reasons why the United States is expanding its force rather significantly.

Vickers said that the terrorists’ sanctuary in Afghanistan was not the only pre-9/11 problem, although he qualified it as a “very, very severe problem.”

What preoccupied him were terrorist groups with global reach; i.e. the European cells, those in East Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, in Southeast Asia. Vickers described it as “a global problem that exploited globalization.”

But new efforts combined with new tactics began to show positive results, particularly in Saudi Arabia against a group known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula that initially was doing rather well until the tides turned on them. And more recently there have been some great successes against al-Qaida in Iraq.

“Al-Qaida in Iraq is now a whisper of what it used to be,” said Vickers. However, he warned that it doesn’t mean that the threat is completely dissipated. “But its capabilities are a lot less on many metrics than it was a couple of years ago.”

Al-Qaida has also demonstrated a capability to regenerate, regroup and re-surge. “When they get set back, they’re able to replace some losses, not necessarily to the previous level, not necessarily to the same skill in some individuals, but they do have a regeneration capability,” said Vickers.

The hundreds of Special Forces trying to track down Osama bin Laden have not prevented the most wanted man on the planet from writing a book.

Indeed, according to a report from the U.S. State Department’s Counterterrorist unit, bin Laden is writing a book called “Nidal,” or Struggle. This, according to Pakistani sources, is to respond to “negative propaganda and insufficient information” about al-Qaida. The book will be written in Arabic and translated into English.

The report states that bin Laden will play up on “atrocities” committed by the West against Muslims and how the “crusaders” have harmed world development.