Science Daily March 14, 2022 In a report a team of researchers in the US (Yale College Harvard University, AIAA, industry) responded to a question posed by the US National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in a landmark study in March 2021 which recognized the need for additional research on the viability of depositing aerosols well above 20 km to deflect incoming sunlight and countervail global warming. According to the team airliners and military jets routinely cruise near 10 km, whereas 20 km is the realm of high-flying spy planes and drones. Planning to fly hundreds of thousands of […]
UCLA materials scientists lead global team in finding solutions to biggest hurdle for solar cell technology
EurekAlert March 15, 2022 Optoelectronic devices consist of heterointerfaces formed between dissimilar semiconducting materials. The relative energy level alignment between contacting semiconductors determinately affects the heterointerface charge injection and extraction dynamics. For perovskite solar cells (PSCs), the heterointerface between the top perovskite surface and a charge-transporting material (CTM) is often treated for defect passivation to improve PSC stability and performance. However, such surface treatments could also affect the heterointerface energetics. An international team of researchers (USA – UCLA, UC Irvine, Turkey, South Korea, Taiwan) has shown that surface treatments may induce a negative work function shift (i.e., more n-type), which […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of March 11, 2022
01. Breakthrough in quantum sensing provides new material to make qubits 02. Exploring the bounds of room-temperature superconductivity 03. ‘Fingerprint’ machine learning technique identifies different bacteria in seconds 04. Form-free metasurfaces enable novel and intelligent optical illusion 05. The future of data storage is double-helical, research indicates 06. Physicists show how frequencies can easily be multiplied without special circuitry 07. Researchers design charged ‘power suits’ for electric vehicles and spacecraft 08. Robot ‘bugs’ that can go just about anywhere 09. Study raises new possibilities for triggering room-temperature superconductivity with light 10. Vacuum fluctuations break topological protection And others… Analysis suggests […]
Analysis suggests China has passed US on one research measure
Phys.org March 8, 2022 The top-1% most-highly-cited articles are watched closely as the vanguards of the sciences. However, this finding contrasts with repeated reports of Western agencies that the quality of China’s output in science is lagging other advanced nations, even as it has caught up in numbers of articles. An international team of researchers (USA -Ohio State University, China, the Netherlands) used field normalizations, a new measurement method, which classify source journals by discipline. Classifications can be used for the decomposition, but not for the normalization. When the data is thus decomposed, the USA ranks ahead of China in […]
Better memristors for brain-like computing
Nanowerk March 8, 2022 Researchers in China reviewed the latest developments in the design of memristors for artificial synapses, the main component of a neuromorphic computing architecture, used in neuromorphic computing. Memristors are a relatively ideal candidate for artificial synapse applications due to their high scalability and low power consumption. However, oxide memristors suffer from unsatisfactory stability and reliability. Oxide-based hybrid structures can effectively improve the device stability and reliability, therefore providing a promising prospect for the application of oxide memristors to neuromorphic computing. The discussion is organized according to the blending schemes as well as the working mechanisms of […]
Breakthrough in quantum sensing provides new material to make qubits
Phys.org March 9, 2022 Being atomically thin and amenable to external controls, 2D materials offer a new paradigm for the realization of patterned qubit fabrication and operation at room temperature for quantum information sciences applications. An international team of researchers (USA – Temple University, Northeastern University, Taiwan) has shown that the antisite defect in 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) can provide a controllable solid-state spin qubit system. Using high-throughput atomistic simulations, they identified several neutral antisite defects in TMDs that lie deep in the bulk band gap and host a paramagnetic triplet ground state. The analysis revealed the presence of […]
Carbon dioxide could be stored below ocean floor, research shows
Science Daily March 7, 2022 Naturally occurring methane (CH4) hydrates in oceanic sediments have been stable for millions of years kept in place by the natural pressure created by the weight of the seawater above. At low-temperature and under high-pressure conditions created by the ocean, CO2 can be trapped within water molecules, forming an ice-like substance. These CO2 hydrates form at a temperature just above the freezing point of water and can store as much as 184 cubic metres of CO2 in one cubic meter of hydrates. An international team of researchers (Singapore, USA – industry) recreated the conditions of […]
Exploring the bounds of room-temperature superconductivity
Science Daily March 9, 2022 Several reports of high superconducting transition temperature (Tc) up to 287 K in hydrides under pressure of up to 267 GPa have appeared. The ultrahigh pressure needed to create the high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) in hydrides has hampered the detailed study of the high-pressure-induced high-Tc superconductivity state, as well as any potential applications. Researchers at the University of Houston developed a pressure-quench process (PQP) and demonstrated it successfully in stabilizing at ambient the high-pressure-induced superconducting phases and other phases in the non-superconducting element Sb, the binary superconducting compound FeSe, and the non-superconducting compound Cu-doped FeSe. According […]
‘Fingerprint’ machine learning technique identifies different bacteria in seconds
Phys.org March 4, 2022 Researchers in South Korea have demonstrated a markedly simpler, faster, and effective route to classify signals of two common bacteria E. coli and S. epidermidis and their resident media without any separation procedures by using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) analysis boosted with a newly proposed deep learning model named dual-branch wide-kernel network (DualWKNet). With outstanding classification accuracies up to 98%, the synergistic combination of SERS and deep learning serves as an effective platform for “separation-free“ detection of bacteria in arbitrary media with short data acquisition times and small amounts of training data. Universal and fast bacterial […]
Form-free metasurfaces enable novel and intelligent optical illusion
Nanowerk March 4, 2022 The mainstream transformation-optics-based optical illusions are inherently hindered by the extreme requirements of metamaterial compositions in practice and large computational cost. To address these issues researchers in China have proposed an intelligent optical illusion supported by form-free metasurfaces via a deep learning architecture which can render a similar illusion effect and greatly reduce the parameter space in physics. They have presented illustrative examples of conformal metasurfaces with a high-fidelity inverse design from either the near- or far-field in the simulation and experiment. They developed a full set of intelligent systems to benchmark the real-world optical illusion […]