Science Daily June 9, 2022 Polystyrene is among the most common forms of plastic, but recycling it is not easy and the vast majority ends up in landfills or ocean. Researchers in Australia discovered that superworms can survive on a sole polystyrene diet, and even gain a small amount of weight—compared to a starvation control group. They analyzed the microbial gut community and found which gene-encoded enzymes were involved in degrading the plastic. One way to put the findings to use would be to provide super worms with food waste or agricultural bioproducts to consume alongside polystyrene. But while breeding […]
Theory suggests quantum computers should be exponentially faster on some learning tasks than classical machines
Phys.org June 10, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – Catech, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Google, Microsoft, Austria) has proved that quantum machines could learn from exponentially fewer experiments than the number required by conventional experiments. This exponential advantage is shown for predicting properties of physical systems, performing quantum principal component analysis, and learning about physical dynamics. The quantum resources needed for achieving an exponential advantage are quite modest in some cases. Conducting experiments with 40 superconducting qubits and 1300 quantum gates, they demonstrated that a substantial quantum advantage is possible with today’s quantum processors…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE 1 […]
What quantum information and snowflakes have in common, and what we can do about it
Science Daily June 15, 2022 Transducing quantum signals between disparate regimes of the electro-magnetic spectrum remains an outstanding goal. Many remote entanglement protocols require multiple qubit gates both preceding and following the upconversion of the quantum state, and thus an ideal transducer should impart minimal backaction on the qubit. A team of researchers in the US (University of Colorado, NIST) demonstrated readout of a superconducting transmon qubit through a low-backaction electro-optomechanical transducer. The modular nature of the transducer and circuit quantum electrodynamics system used in this work enabled complete isolation of the qubit from optical photons, and the backaction on […]
World’s first ultra-fast photonic computing processor using polarization
Phys.org June 15, 2022 While wavelength-selective systems have widely proliferated, polarization-addressable active photonics has not seen notable progress, primarily because tunable and polarization-selective nanostructures have been elusive. Researchers in the UK have introduced hybridized-active-dielectric (HAD) nanowires to achieve polarization-selective tunability. They demonstrated the ability to use polarization as a parameter to selectively modulate the conductance of individual nanowires within a multi-nanowire system. By using polarization as the tunable vector, they showed matrix-vector multiplication in a nanowire device configuration. According to the researchers while the HAD nanowires use phase-change materials as the active material, this concept can be generalized to other […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of June 10, 2022
01. Breakthrough paves way for photonic sensing at the ultimate quantum limit 02. Clean doping strategy produces more responsive phototransistors 03. Developing the next generation of quantum algorithms and materials 04. Engineers create chip that can process and classify nearly two billion images per second 05. Exploring the use of the nanoscale bowtie antenna under optical and electrical excitations 06. High-speed, efficient, and compact electro-optic modulators for free space 07. Researchers demonstrate 40-channel optical communication link, capable of transmitting 400 GB of data per second 08. Researchers Just Set a New Record For Data Transmission Speed 09. Room-temperature molecular switch […]
Breakthrough paves way for photonic sensing at the ultimate quantum limit
Phys.org June 6, 2022 Quantum states of light have been shown to enhance precision in absorption estimation over classical strategies. However, most quantum sensing schemes rely on special entangled or squeezed states of light or matter that are hard to generate and detect. Researchers in the UK have shown it is possible to perform high precision measurements of important physical properties without the need for sophisticated quantum states of light and detection schemes. The key to this breakthrough is the use of ring resonators that guide light in a loop and maximize its interaction with the sample under study. Importantly, […]
Clean doping strategy produces more responsive phototransistors
Phys.org June 7, 2022 An international team of researchers (China, USA – SUNY Buffalo) studied and demonstrated the implementation of neutron-transmutation doping (NTD) to manipulate electron transfer. NTD is a controllable in-situ substitutional doping method that utilizes the nuclear reactions of thermal neutrons with the nuclei of the atoms in semiconductors. It provides a new way to dope 2D materials intentionally without extra reagents and it can be introduced into any step during the fabrication of 2D-materials-based devices, or even used post-fabrication. They successfully narrowed the bandgap and increased the electron mobility of SN-doped layered InSe, reflecting a significant improvement. […]
Developing the next generation of quantum algorithms and materials
Phys.org June 6, 2022 In its current stage of development, quantum computing is still very sensitive to noise and disruptive factors in the environment. To overcome these limitations a team of researchers in the US (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Microsoft, MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Washington University) is developing simulations that provide a glimpse into how quantum computers work. They combined two different types of simulations to create the Northwest Quantum Simulator (NWQ-Sim) to test quantum algorithms. It can help us look beyond the limitations of the existing devices and test algorithms for more sophisticated systems. […]
Engineers create chip that can process and classify nearly two billion images per second
Nanowerk June 4, 2022 In the optical domain, despite advances in photonic computation, the lack of scalable on-chip optical non-linearity and the loss of photonic devices limit the scalability of optical deep networks. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania created an integrated end-to-end photonic deep neural network (PDNN) that performs sub-nanosecond image classification through direct processing of the optical waves impinging on the on-chip pixel array as they propagate through layers of neurons. In each neuron, linear computation was performed optically, and the non-linear activation function was realized opto-electronically, allowing a classification time of under 570 ps, which is comparable with […]
Exploring the use of the nanoscale bowtie antenna under optical and electrical excitations
Phys.org June 2, 2022 Nanoscale bowtie antennas have been extensively studied for their high confinement and enhancement. In this mini-review, researchers in China start with a brief introduction to bowtie antennas and underlying physics. They review the applications with respect to optically and electrically excited nanoscale bowtie antennas. Optically driven bowtie antennas enable a set of optical applications such as near-field imaging/trapping, nonlinear response, nanolithography, photon generation and detection. They conclude with the principle and applications of electrically driven bowtie antennas, as an emerging method of generating ultrafast and broadband tunable nano sources…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE