Phys.org July 17, 2023 On Sunday, July 9, launched a prototype internet satellite from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia. The satellite will conduct several tests to validate the broadband satellite technology. The long-term aim of the project is to create a constellation of 13,000 satellites code-named “Guo Wang”. They intend to create two constellations (GW-A59 and GW-2) with a coverage of 37.5 to 42.5 GHz (space-to-Earth) and 47.2 to 51.4 GHz (Earth-to-space). According to multiple sources, this constellation is part of a wider effort by China to stake its claim to the growing satellite internet market. The […]
DARPA Seeks Input on Novel Methods to Separate, Purify Rare Earth Elements
DARPA News July 12, 2023 Rare Earth Elements (REEs) comprise 17 elements, including scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanide series. REE extraction, separation, and purification from a complex feedstock can be environmentally degrading, energy inefficient, and difficult to permit in the United States. DARPA is sponsoring a hybrid workshop, to be held on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 to provide an overview and facilitate technical discussion regarding the Separation and Purification of Rare Earth Elements (SPREE) Advanced Research Concept (ARC) opportunity. The SPREE ARC opportunity is soliciting ideas to explore the following question: How can we purify Department of Defense (DoD)-relevant REEs […]
Intelligent rubber materials
Nanowerk July 18, 2023 Researchers in Germany have developed intelligent humidity-programmed hydrogel patches with high stretchability and tunable water-uptake and -release by copolymerization and crosslinking of N-isopropylacrylamide and oligo(ethylene glycol) comonomers. The intelligent elastomeric patches strongly responded to different humidities and temperatures in terms of mechanical properties which made them applicable for soft robotics and smart skin applications where autonomous adaption to environmental conditions was a key requirement. Beyond using the hydrogel in the conventional state in aqueous media, the new patches could be controlled by relative humidity. The humidity programming of the patches allowed to tune drug release kinetics, […]
New material could hold key to reducing energy consumption in computers and electronics
Nanowerk July 13, 2023 Contrary to topological insulators, topological semimetals possess a nontrivial chiral anomaly that leads to negative magnetoresistance and host to both conductive bulk states and topological surface states with intriguing transport properties for spintronics. Researchers at the University of Minnesota fabricated highly ordered metallic Pt3Sn and Pt3SnxFe1-x thin films via sputtering technology. Systematic angular dependence (both in-plane and out-of-plane) study of magnetoresistance presented surprisingly robust quadratic and linear negative longitudinal magnetoresistance features for Pt3Sn and Pt3SnxFe1-x, respectively. They attributed the anomalous negative longitudinal magnetoresistance to the type-II Dirac semimetal phase (pristine Pt3Sn) and/or the formation of tunable […]
Next-generation flow battery design sets records
Science Daily July 10, 2023 Redox flow batteries have a unique architecture that potentially enables cost-effective long-duration energy storage to address the intermittency introduced by increased renewable integration for the decarbonization of the electric power sector. Targeted molecular engineering has demonstrated electrochemical reversibility in natively redox-inactive ketone molecules in aqueous electrolytes. However, the kinetics of fluorenone-based flow batteries continue to be limited by slow alcohol oxidation. A team of researchers in the US (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Yale University) showed how strategically designed proton regulators can accelerate alcohol oxidation and thus enhance battery kinetics. Fluorenone-based flow batteries with the organic […]
Photonic Time Crystals Generated From Rapid Shifts in Laser Light
Science Alert July 15, 2023 Scientists experimenting with some of the most fundamental laws of physics have found more evidence of photonic time crystals (PTCs): materials in which the refractive index oscillates very quickly. An international team of researchers (Israel, USA – University of Perdue) trained lasers on two transparent conducting oxides and used the lasers to rapidly change the refractive index for periods less than 10 femtoseconds. They observed significant shifts in the light frequency and in the light relaxation time depending on the thickness of the material and the speed with which the refractive index was altered. Increasing […]
Preparing for a quantum leap: Researchers chart future for use of quantum computing in particle physics
Phys.org July 17, 2023 The rapid development of hardware devices with various realizations of qubits enables the execution of small scale but representative applications on quantum computers. The high-energy physics community plays a pivotal role in accessing the power of quantum computing, since the field is a driving source for challenging computational problems. This concerns, on the theoretical side, the exploration of models which are very hard or even impossible to address with classical techniques and, on the experimental side, the enormous data challenge of newly emerging experiments, such as the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. In this roadmap […]
Proposed metamaterial could have a wide range of applications, from sensing to stealth technology
Phys.org July 17, 2023 Materials scientists are actively hunting for metamaterials that are “perfect absorbers” of electromagnetic radiation with controllable resonance characteristics that lead to their wide usage in applications as varied as solar cells, thermal radiation imaging, sensing technology, and even stealth technology. An international team of researchers (Pakistan, USA – University of Alabama) has developed a triple-band perfect metamaterial absorber in terahertz regime that is made of asymmetric metallic I-shaped resonator and metallic ground layer with dielectric spacer in the middle. The simulated results showed that the absorption device had three resonance modes with corresponding absorption rate close […]
Researchers achieve interdimensional superconductivity
Nanowerk July 19, 2023 Spatial disorder has been shown to drive two-dimensional (2D) superconductors to an insulating phase through a superconductor–insulator transition (SIT). Numerical calculations predict that with increasing disorder, emergent electronic granularity is expected in these materials—a phenomenon where superconducting (SC) domains on the scale of the material’s coherence length are embedded in an insulating matrix and coherently coupled by Josephson tunneling. An international team of researchers (USA – SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Colombia) has shown spatially resolved scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) measurements of the three-dimensional (3D) superconductor BaPb1−xBixO3 (BPBO), which surprisingly demonstrated three key signatures of emergent electronic […]
Researchers use liquid crystals that mimic beetle shell coloration units to create a more secure type of QR code
Phys.org July 14, 2023 Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their unique chiral structural color. Unlike ordinary CLCs materials, CLCs particles exhibit angle-independence, making them particularly noteworthy. However, currently, there are limited effective methods for controlling the structural color of CLCs particles, other than adjusting the concentration of chiral dopants or introducing stimuli-responsive groups. Researchers in Japan have developed a scalable and cost-effective process for preparing monodisperse CLCs particles via dispersion polymerization. By making CLCs into micrometer-sized monodisperse spheres, the helical pitch of CLCs could be varied according to its particle size, and the resulting structural […]