IEEE Spectrum January 12, 2021 Silicon Valley’s magical concentration of talent, capital, and culture in a single place has led to decades of unparalleled wealth creation. This spectacular success has induced attempts to emulate it in such enclaves as Silicon Mountain (one in the African nation of Cameroon, and another in the U.S. state of Colorado), Silicon Hills (Texas), Silicon Desert (Arizona), and many more. These seedlings may indeed grow to become forests, but the ingredients are there for even more promising transformations—metamorphoses that would bring far greater resources together at abstracted, or virtual, focal points. According to the author […]
Electrically switchable qubit can tune between storage and fast calculation modes
Science Daily January 11, 2021 An international team of researchers (Switzerland, the Netherland) has created the qubits in the form of “hole spins” that can be switched from a stable idle mode to a fast calculation mode. The spins can be selectively coupled — via a photon, for example — to other spins by tuning their resonant frequencies. They can be coherently flipped from up to down in as little as a nanosecond allowing up to a billion switches per second. For their experiments, the researchers used a semiconductor nanowire made of silicon and germanium wire that has a diameter […]
Expert prognosis for the planet – we’re on track for a ghastly future
Science Daily January 13, 2021 An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – Stanford University, Virginia Tech, UC Berkeley, industry, Oregon State University, UCLA, Mexico) outlines clearly and unambiguously the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption, planetary toxification, all tied to human consumption and population growth to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come. It also explains the impact of political impotence and the ineffectiveness of current and planned actions to address the ominous scale of environmental erosion…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Nanosheet-based electronics could be one drop away
Nanowerk January 8, 2021 Researchers in Japan overcame the “coffee ring” effect of drop casting by controlled convection using a pipette and a hotplate. They found that dropping a solution containing 2D nanosheets with a simple pipette onto a substrate heated on a hotplate to a temperature of about 100°C, followed by removal of the solution, causes the nanosheets to come together in about 30 seconds to form a tile-like layer. They demonstrated controlled thermal convection by depositing particle solutions of titanium dioxide, calcium niobate, ruthenium oxide, and graphene oxide. They also tried different sizes and shapes of a variety […]
New state of matter in one-dimensional quantum gas
Phys.org January 14, 2021 Long-lived excited states of interacting quantum systems that retain quantum correlations and evade thermalization are of great fundamental interest. A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, City University of New York) created nonthermal states in a bosonic one-dimensional (1D) quantum gas of dysprosium by stabilizing a super-Tonks-Girardeau gas against collapse and thermalization with repulsive long-range dipolar interactions. Stiffness and energy-per-particle measurements show that the system is dynamically stable regardless of contact interaction strength. This enables us to cycle contact interactions from weakly to strongly repulsive, then strongly attractive, and finally weakly attractive. They showed […]
Number of people suffering extreme droughts will double
Science Daily January 11, 2021 Using ensemble hydrological simulations, an international team of researchers (USA – Michigan State University, Japan, Austria, Germany, UK, Greece, Switzerland, China, Belgium, the Netherlands) shows that climate change could reduce TWS (Terrestrial water storage ) in many regions, especially those in the Southern Hemisphere. Strong inter-ensemble agreement indicates high confidence in the projected changes that are driven primarily by climate forcing rather than land and water management activities. Declines in TWS translate to increases in future droughts. By the late twenty-first century, the global land area and population in extreme-to-exceptional TWS drought could more than […]
Researchers report quantum-limit-approaching chemical sensing chip
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, […]
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 […]