Phys.org January 11, 2021 To fabricate high‐density random metallic nanopatterns with accurately controlled nanogaps an international team of researchers (USA – SUNY Buffalo, China, Saudi Arabia) used four molecules (BZT, 4-MBA, BPT, and TPT), each with different lengths. They used atomic layer deposition and self-assembled monolayers instead of electron-beam lithography. The resulting SERS (surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy) chip with unprecedented uniformity is relatively inexpensive to produce and has gap size approaching the quantum regime of ≈0.78 nm. They demonstrated its potential for quantitative sensing with the relative standard deviation of 4.3% over large area. All chemicals have unique light-scattering signatures; therefore, […]
Author Archives: Hema Viswanath
Scientists tame photon-magnon interaction
Nanowerk January 14, 2021 Microwave photon-magnon interaction has emerged in recent years as a promising platform for both classical and quantum information processing. Yet, this interaction had proved impossible to manipulate in real time. By smart engineering, a team of researchers in the US (Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago) employed an electrical signal to periodically alter the magnon vibrational frequency and thereby inducing effective magnon-photon interaction resulting in a microwave-magnonic device with on-demand tunability. The device can control the strength of the photon-magnon interaction at any point as information is being transferred between photons and magnons. It can even […]
Studying chaos with one of the world’s fastest cameras
Science Daily January 13, 2021 Chaotic systems play a large role in the world around us. They exhibit behavior that is predictable at first but grows increasingly random with time. A team of researchers in the US (Caltech, University of Southern California) designed an ultrafast camera that recorded video at one billion frames per second to observe the movement of laser light in a chamber specially designed to induce chaotic reflections where light takes a different path every time the experiment is repeated. Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras are capable of speeds as fast as 70 trillion frames per second […]
Trapping light without back reflections
Phys.org January 4, 2021 Due to material imperfections, some amount of light is reflected backwards in microresonators which disturbs their function. To reduce the unwanted backscattering an international team of researchers (UK, Germany) used the principle of noise cancelling headphone and introduced out-of-phase light to cancel out optical interference. To generate the out-of-phase light, the researchers position a sharp metal tip close to the microresonator surface. The tip also causes light to scatter backwards. As the phase of the reflected light can be chosen by controlling the position of the tip, backscattered light’s phase can be set so it annihilates […]
Using electricity to increase the amount of data that can be stored by DNA
Phys.org January 12, 2021 Researchers at Columbia University have developed a new electrogenetic framework for direct storage of digital data in living cells. Using an engineered redox-responsive CRISPR adaptation system, they encoded binary data in 3-bit units into CRISPR arrays of bacterial cells by electrical stimulation. They demonstrated multiplex data encoding into barcoded cell populations to yield meaningful information storage and capacity up to 72 bits, which can be maintained over many generations in natural open environments. Their work establishes a direct digital-to-biological data storage framework and advances the capacity for information exchange between silicon- and carbon-based entities…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of January 8, 2021
01. Breaking through the resolution barrier with quantum-limited precision 02. World’s fastest optical neuromorphic processor 03. Extremely fast electrochromic supercapacitors 04. Neither liquid nor solid 05. Old silicon learns new tricks 06. Innovative battery chemistry revolutionizes zinc-air battery 07. Scrambled supersolids: Soft form of a solid discovered 08. Intel’s Stacked Nanosheet Transistors Could Be the Next Step in Moore’s Law 09. Machine-learning models of matter beyond interatomic potentials 10. On the road to invisible solar panels: How tomorrow’s windows will generate electricity And others… Alert system shows potential for reducing deforestation, mitigating climate change An avalanche of violence: Analysis reveals […]
Alert system shows potential for reducing deforestation, mitigating climate change
Science Daily January 4, 2021 Global Land Analysis and Discovery System (GLAD), launched in 2016, delivers alerts created by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab based on high-resolution satellite imaging from NASA’s Landsat Science program. The information is made available to subscribers via the interactive web application, Global Forest Watch. A team of researchers in the US (University of Wisconsin, Oregon State University, World Resources Institute, Washington, University of Maryland) looked at deforestation in 22 nations in the tropics in South America, Africa, and Asia between 2011 and 2018 — the last five years before GLAD […]
An avalanche of violence: Analysis reveals predictable patterns in armed conflicts
Phys.org January 8, 2021 The scaling law proposed in 1941 suggests smaller conflicts are scaled-down versions of bigger ones. This is surprising because one might think that big conflicts and small conflicts are the results of different kinds of processes and social problems. A team of researchers in the US (Santa Fe Institute, Cornell University, Arizona State University) built a new model analyzing data from two decades of armed conflicts in Africa. The dataset includes more than 100,000 events that occurred up to thousands of kilometers apart. They propose a randomly branching armed conflict model to relate the multiple properties […]
Breaking through the resolution barrier with quantum-limited precision
Science Daily January 5, 2021 An international team of researchers (USA – Stanford University, Canada, Czech Republic, Spain, Germany) presents a temporal-mode demultiplexing scheme that achieves the ultimate quantum precision for the simultaneous estimation of the temporal centroid, the time offset, and the relative intensities of an incoherent mixture of ultrashort pulses at the single-photon level. They experimentally resolved temporal separations 10 times smaller than the pulse duration, as well as imbalanced intensities. This represents an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over the best standard methods based on intensity detection. The findings could allow significant improvements in […]
The Earth has been spinning faster lately
Phys.org January 7, 2021 The atomic clocks make it possible to measure the length of a given day down to the millisecond. Since such measurements began, scientists have found that the Earth was slowing its spin very gradually (compensated by the insertion of a leap second now and then) until this past year, when it began spinning faster so much so that some in the field have begun to wonder if a negative leap negative second might be needed this year. Scientists also noted that this past summer, on July 19, the shortest day ever was recorded—it was 1.4602 milliseconds […]