01. Breakthrough for efficient and high-speed spintronic devices 02. DARPA Seeks Ionospheric Insights to Improve Communication Across Domains 03. New hardware integrates mechanical devices into quantum tech 04. A novel insulating state emerges in a 2D material 05. Researchers create exotic magnetic structures with laser light 06. Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker 07. Scientists turn a hydrogen molecule into a quantum sensor 08. Two teams use neutral atoms to create quantum circuits 09. Unexpected light behavior may be harnessed to improve optical communications and sensors 10. A new guide to extremely powerful light pulses And others… China detects first human […]
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Breakthrough for efficient and high-speed spintronic devices
Science Daily April 25, 2022 How the spin evolves in the nanoworld on extremely short time scales, in one millionth of one billionth of a second, has remained largely mysterious. An international team of researchers (Austria, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, France, China) used a tabletop ultrafast soft X-ray microscope based on a high-energy Ytterbium laser to spatio-temporally resolve the spin dynamics inside rare earth materials. They recorded a series of snapshot images of the nanoscale rare earth magnetic structures providing rich information on the magnetic properties that are as accurate as those obtained using large-scale X-ray facilities. According to the researchers […]
China detects first human case of H3N8 bird flu
MedXpress April 27, 2022 H3N8 is known to have been circulating since 2002 after first emerging in North American waterfowl. It is known to infect horses, dogs, and seals, but has not previously been detected in humans. China’s National Health Commission on Tuesday said a four-year-old boy living in central Henan province tested positive for the strain after being hospitalized earlier this month with a fever and other symptoms. The boy was infected directly by birds and the strain was not found to have “the ability to effectively infect humans”, the commission said. The H5N1 and H7N9 strains of bird […]
Climate change triggering global collapse in insect numbers, stressed farmland shows 63% decline: New research
Phys.org April 21, 2022 Although research has shown that biodiversity changes are driven primarily by land-use change and increasingly by climate change, the potential for interaction between these drivers and insect biodiversity on the global scale remains unclear. Researchers in the UK have shown that the interaction between indices of historical climate warming and intensive agricultural land use is associated with reductions of almost 50% in the abundance and 27% in the number of species within insect assemblages relative to those in less-disturbed habitats with lower rates of historical climate warming. These patterns are particularly evident in the tropical realm. […]
DARPA Seeks Ionospheric Insights to Improve Communication Across Domains
DARPA April 22, 2022 DARPA’s new Ouija program aims to use sensors on low-orbiting satellites to provide new insights into HF radio wave propagation in the ionosphere. Ouija will augment ground-based measurements with in-situ measurements from space, in very low- Earth orbit (VLEO), to develop and validate accurate, near real-time HF propagation predictions. The VLEO altitude regime is of particular interest due to its information-rich environment where ionospheric electron density is at a maximum. The program includes two technical areas. The first technical area announced in a solicitation, seeks to develop, qualify, launch, and operate multiple small satellites carrying scientific […]
Insights narrow the gap between large-scale atmospheric models and microscale features of atmospheric winds
Phys.org April 26, 2022 Modeling anomalies referred to as grey zone, arise when the model resolution approximates the length scale of turbulence features while modeling the atmosphere. An international team of researchers (USA – Notre Dame, Saudi Arabia) leveraged a new set of one-way nested, full-physics multiscale numerical experiments to quantify the magnitude of the errors introduced at gray zone resolutions in a real-case application. The new set of experiments conducted in Saudi Arabia spanned a wide range of scales and strategies to suppress resolved convection at gray zone resolutions. Detailed analyses of their experiments showed that (i) grid-dependent convective […]
A new guide to extremely powerful light pulses
Phys.org April 26, 2022 An international team of researchers (Germany, Norway) has developed a very compact and highly robust method to compress 1.24 ps pulses to 39 fs by means of only a single spectral broadening stage which neither requires vacuum parts nor custom-made optics. The approach is based on the hybridization of the multiplate continuum and the multipass cell spectral broadening techniques whose combination led to significantly higher spectral broadening factors in bulk material. They used a burst-mode Yb:YAG laser emitting pulses with 80 MW peak power that are enhanced to more than 1 GW after post compression. With only 0.19% rms pulse-to-pulse energy […]
New hardware integrates mechanical devices into quantum tech
Phys.org April 22, 2022 Proposals to combine microwave-frequency mechanical resonators with superconducting devices suggest the possibility of powerful quantum acoustic processors. At present the acoustic platforms lack processors capable of controlling the quantum states of several mechanical oscillators with a single qubit and the rapid quantum non-demolition measurements of mechanical states needed for error correction. Researchers at Stanford University used a superconducting qubit to control and read out the quantum state of a pair of nanomechanical resonators. Their device is capable of fast qubit–mechanics swap operations, which they used to deterministically manipulate the mechanical states. By placing the qubit into […]
A novel insulating state emerges in a 2D material
Nanowerk April 23, 2022 Within the Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMD) family, iridium ditelluride (IrTe2) is ideally suited for the systematic study of competing factors that can affect a material’s electronic properties. An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, UC Berkeley, Sandford University, South Korea, Egypt) synthesized bilayer and monolayer IrTe2 samples and characterized their atomic and electronic structures. The analysis of the material showed that monolayer IrTe2 develops a large band gap that’s an order of magnitude larger than is typical for TMD systems, transforming the material into an insulator through the removal […]
Research team follows nearly 8,000 paths towards better cell factories
Phys.org April 26, 2022 The inhibitory compounds found in hydrolysates in biomass substantially influence the performance of a cell factory and the economic feasibility of lignocellulosic biofuels and chemicals. Researchers in Sweden analyzed data on Saccharomyces cerevisiae mutants engineered for altered tolerance towards the most common inhibitors found in lignocellulosic hydrolysates: acetic acid, formic acid, furans, and phenolic compounds. The mutants included in the analysis had been shown to display increased or decreased tolerance to individual inhibitors or combinations of inhibitors found in lignocellulosic hydrolysates. Genetic engineering aimed at improving inhibitor or hydrolysate tolerance altered the specific growth rate or […]