Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience.

The question of what generates conscious experience has mesmerized thinkers since the dawn of humanity, yet its origins remain a mystery. The topic of consciousness has gained traction in recent years, thanks to the development of large language models that now arguably pass the Turing test, an operational test for intelligence. However, intelligence and consciousness are not related in obvious ways, as anyone who suffers from a bad toothache can attest-pain generates intense feelings and absorbs all our conscious awareness, yet nothing particularly intelligent is going on.

Follow-up care and support to parents of premature children: Multidisciplinary versus regular follow-up care.

Background: Preterm care involves clinical measures almost exclusively aimed at keeping the preterm alive and ready for discharge from hospital. Children are then enrolled in clinical follow-up care after this stressful period, but mental or specialised care for parents and child is often not embedded in the routine of a neonatal hospital ward and the family is then dependent on institutions for mental health or child health clinics, that is, regular care that is regionally scattered. This study aimed to investigate experiences of parents with regular care and compare them with parents visiting a fixed, specialised, multidisciplinary institute, outside the hospital walls, for preterm follow-up care.

MoRe Electrodes with 10 nm Nanogaps for Electrical Contact to Atomically Precise Graphene Nanoribbons.

Atomically precise graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) are predicted to exhibit exceptional edge-related properties, such as localized edge states, spin polarization, and half-metallicity. However, the absence of low-resistance nanoscale electrical contacts to the GNRs hinders harnessing their properties in field-effect transistors. In this paper, we make electrical contact with nine-atom-wide armchair GNRs using superconducting alloy MoRe as well as Pd (as a reference), which are two of the metals providing low-resistance contacts to carbon nanotubes.

Single-emitter quantum key distribution over 175 km of fibre with optimised finite key rates.

Quantum key distribution with solid-state single-photon emitters is gaining traction due to their rapidly improving performance and compatibility with future quantum networks. Here we emulate a quantum key distribution scheme with quantum-dot-generated single photons frequency-converted to 1550 nm, achieving count rates of 1.6 MHz with [Formula: see text] and asymptotic positive key rates over 175 km of telecom fibre.

Realignment-free cryogenic macroscopic optical cavity coupled to an optical fiber.

We present a cryogenic setup where an optical Fabry-Perot resonator is coupled to a single-mode optical fiber with coupling efficiency above 90% at mK temperatures without realignment during cooling down. The setup is prealigned at room temperature to compensate for the thermal contraction and change of the refractive index of the optical components during cooling down. The high coupling efficiency is achieved by keeping the setup rotation-symmetric around the optical axis.