Science Daily January 4, 2021 An international team of researchers (Austria, Switzerland) created supersolids using ultracold quantum gases of highly magnetic lanthanide atoms. This state of matter is solid and liquid at the same time. Due to quantum effects, a very cold gas of atoms can spontaneously develop both a crystalline order of a solid crystal and particle flow like a superfluid quantum liquid. A dipolar supersolid can be imagined as a chain of quantum droplets which communicate with each other via a superfluid background bath. They found that if the superfluid bath between the droplets is drained by control […]
World’s fastest optical neuromorphic processor
Science Daily January 7, 2021 Convolutional neural networks have been central to the artificial intelligence revolution, but existing silicon technology increasingly presents a bottleneck in processing speed and energy efficiency. An international team of researchers (Australia, China, Canada) has demonstrated an optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence which operates faster than 10 trillion operations per second (TeraOPs/s) and is capable of processing ultra-large scale data, enough to achieve full facial image recognition, something that other optical processors have been unable to accomplish. The system uses a single processor and was achieved using a new technique of simultaneously interleaving the data […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of January 01, 2021
01. New quantum nanodevice can simultaneously act as a heat engine and a refrigerator 02. Extremely energy efficient microprocessor developed using superconductors 03. Metasurface enabled quantum edge detection 04. Powering up stretchy technology 05. Researchers achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation 06. Shapeshifting crystals: Varying stability in different forms of gallium selenide monolayers 07. Stretching diamond for next-generation microelectronics 08. Tiny terahertz laser is the first to reach three key performance goals at once 09. Top MIT research stories of 2020 10. Atomic-scale nanowires can now be produced at scale
Atomic-scale nanowires can now be produced at scale
Phys.org December 24, 2020 Transition-metal chalcogenide (TMC) nanowires, which are one-dimensional structures having three-atom diameters and van der Waals surfaces, have been reported to possess a 1D metallic nature with great potential in electronics and energy devices. To mass produce TMC researchers in Japan have demonstrated a wafer-scale synthesis of highly crystalline transition-metal telluride nanowires by chemical vapor deposition. The technique enables formation of either aligned, atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) sheets or random networks of three-dimensional (3D) bundles, both composed of individual nanowires. These nanowires exhibit an anisotropic 1D optical response and superior conducting properties. The findings not only shed […]
Extremely energy efficient microprocessor developed using superconductors
EurekAlert December 28, 2020 Using the adiabatic quantum-flux-parametron (AQFP), as a building block researchers in Japan have developed and demonstrated a prototype 4-bit AQFP microprocessor called MANA (Monolithic Adiabatic iNtegration Architecture). The AQFP is capable of data processing and data storage, it can operate up to a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz making this on par with today’s computing technologies. They expect this to increase to 5-10 GHz as they make improvements in design methodology and experimental setup. According to the researchers even when taking this cooling overhead into account, the AQFP is still about 80 times more energy-efficient when […]
Metasurface enabled quantum edge detection
Phys.org December 29, 2020 Metasurfaces consisting of engineered dielectric or metallic structures provide unique solutions to realize exotic phenomena including negative refraction, achromatic focusing, electromagnetic cloaking, and so on. The intersection of metasurface and quantum optics may lead to new opportunities but is much less explored. An international team of researchers (China, USA – UC San Diego, Columbia University, Harvard University, Austria) proposed and experimentally demonstrated that a polarization-entangled photon source can be used to switch ON or OFF the optical edge detection mode in an imaging system based on a high-efficiency dielectric metasurface. This experiment enriches both fields of […]
New quantum nanodevice can simultaneously act as a heat engine and a refrigerator
Phys.org December 28, 2020 An international team of researchers (Japan, Ukraine, USA – University of Michigan) has experimentally demonstrated the quantum version of the heat engine which uses an electron in a transistor. The electron has two possible energy states. The team could increase or decrease the gap between these energy states by applying an electric field and microwaves. This can be analogous to the periodic expanding–compressing operation of a fluid in a chamber. The device also emitted microwaves when the electron went from the high-energy level to the lower one. By monitoring whether the upper energy level was occupied, […]
Powering up stretchy technology
Nanowerk December 30,2020 Implantable devices need electronics that can be integrated with soft tissue and accommodate the motion of the body. A team of researchers in the US (Michigan State University, Duke University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) is working on “plant wearables,” which are sensors for crops that can stretch and bend as the plants grow and move. To power these devices they used 4D printing to create supercapacitors that can stretch to new limits without compromising their electrochemical performance. The team used an aerosol jet printer to directly deposit a specially formulated ink onto a stretchable polymer substrate. The […]
Researchers achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation
Phys.org December 29, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – Caltech, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, industry, Harvard University, Canada) used fiber-coupled devices, including state-of-the-art low-noise superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors and off-the-shelf optics to achieve conditional quantum teleportation of time-bin qubits at the telecommunication wavelength of 1536.5 nm. They measured teleportation fidelities that are consistent with an analytical model of their system, which includes realistic imperfections. To demonstrate the compatibility of the setup with deployed quantum networks, they teleported qubits over 22 km of single-mode fiber while transmitting qubits over an additional 22 km of fiber. Their systems, which are […]
Shapeshifting crystals: Varying stability in different forms of gallium selenide monolayers
Phys.org December 24, 2020 Gallium selenide monolayer has been recently discovered to have an alternative crystal structure and has diverse potential applications in electronics. Researchers in Japan studied the structural stability and electronic states of GaSe monolayer with trigonal-antiprismatic (AP) structure by first-principles calculations. The AP-phase GaSe monolayer was found stable, and the differences in energy and lattice constant were small when compared to those calculated for a GaSe monolayer with conventional trigonal-prismatic (P) structure which was found to be the ground state. Moreover, it was revealed that the relative stability of P-phase and AP-phase GaSe monolayers reverses under tensile […]