Scientists turn back time with quantum computer

 "Our algorithmic rule may be updated and wont to take a look at programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors," scientist Andrey Lebedev aforementioned.
March 13 (UPI) -- Physicists in Russia have turned back time using a quantum computer.
For some time, researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have been working to prove the second law of thermodynamics can be violated.
"That law is closely associated with the notion of the arrow of your time that posits the unidirectional direction of your time from the past to the long run," lead researcher Gordey Lesovik said in a news release.
Lesovik and his colleagues have already published two papers on the subject. For the latest study, scientists teamed with physicists in the United States and Switzerland to construct a quantum computer capable of violating the second law.
"We have by artificial means created a state that evolves in a very direction opposite to it of the thermodynamical arrow of your time," Lesovik said.
The second law of thermodynamics posits that an isolated system can only remain static or evolve toward a state of chaos. If a video of a cue ball colliding with a pyramid of billiard balls was played backward and forward, the viewer would quickly be able to discern which direction revealed the actual sequence of events. The viewer intuitively understands the second law of thermodynamics.
There are no physical laws that explicitly prevent the violation of the second law, but violations have remained unobserved.
To better understand the odds of the second law being violated, quantum physicists analyzed the behavior individual particles.

"Suppose the negatron is localized once we begin observant it," said Andrey Lebedev, who works at both MIPT and ETH Zurich. "This means we're pretty positive regarding its position in area. The laws of quantum physics forestall U.S. from knowing it with absolute preciseness, but we can outline a small region where the electron is localized."

Schrödinger's equation describes the evolution of a particle's electron state. The region of space containing the electron quickly expands. Chaos increases as systems scale.

"However, Schrödinger's equation is reversible," said Valerii Vinokur, a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. "Mathematically, it means that under a certain transformation called complex conjugation, the equation will describe a 'smeared' electron localizing back into a small region of space over the same time period."
Researchers crunched the numbers and found that if 10 billion freshly localized electrons were observed every second for the entirety of the universe's lifetime, 13.7 billion years, only one particle would be observed reversing time -- spontaneously localizing against the arrow of time.
Next, scientists attempted to manufacture a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. They built a quantum computer with two and three superconducting qubits. Physicists used the quantum computer to conduct a four-stage experiment.
Stage one features an ordered state, with each qubit grounded at zero, like a single electron confined to a small localized region. During the second stage, order is lost. Scientists used an evolution program on the quantum computer to trigger the degradation of order, causing the qubits to begin assuming an increasingly complex pattern of zeros and ones, like an electron getting smeared out across a larger and larger region of space.
For stage three, scientists used another program to reverse time, causing the qubits to evolve from chaos to order -- to reground themselves at zero. For stage four, the evolution program is relaunched from the second stage, causing the qubits to reverse time and revert to their earlier state.
When scientists used a two-qubit computer to conduct the four stage experiment, they observed qubits moving from chaos to order every time. When they introduced a third qubit, the computer produced more errors, and the qubits were able to reverse time only half of the time.
Researchers suggest their findings -- published this week in the journal Scientific Reports -- could be used to improve the precision of quantum devices.
"Our algorithmic rule may be updated and wont to take a look at programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors," Lebedev mentioned.