American Physical Society September 18, 2020 To increase fairness IOP Publishing (IOPP) has announced a major shift in its peer-review methods, which, they say could offer better chances of impartial evaluation. By the end of 2021, IOPP journals will make their default peer-review option “double-blind”, neither reviewers nor authors know each other’s identities. Most scientific journals operate in single-blind mode: Reviewers know who has written the paper they are scrutinizing, but the authors do not know who the reviewers are. Knowing the authors’ identities could be useful to see a new result within the context of previous work. But this […]
New method adds and subtracts for sustainability’s true measure
Science Daily September 17, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (State University of Michigan, UC Merced) used a new integrated framework to guide socioeconomic-environmental interactions within and across adjacent or distant systems (SDG) synergy and trade-off analysis within and across systems, as influenced by cross-boundary tourism and wildlife translocations. The world’s terrestrial protected areas alone receive approximately 8 billion visits per year. Globally, more than 5000 animal species and 29,000 plant species are traded across country borders, and the wildlife trade has arguably contributed to zoonotic disease worldwide, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They synthesized 22 cases […]
New on/off functionality for fast, sensitive, ultra-small technologies
Science Daily September 15, 2020 Actuation at micro- and nanoscale often requires large displacements and applied forces. An international team of researchers (Italy, Japan) has developed an ultra-small actuator based on vanadium oxide crystals that can be turned on and off in a fraction of a millisecond and exhibits nanometer-scale position control. The device is thermally activated through heating just above room temperature to trigger the VO2 crystalline symmetry change associated with the metal–insulator transition. The large lattice expansion of VO2 phase transition, compared to standard materials, is further amplified by the chevron-type geometry. DC and AC operation of the […]
A new strategy to implement a high-fidelity mixed-species entangling gate
Phys.org September 22, 2020 One of the greatest challenges in the development of trapped ion quantum computers is scalability because adding new qubits to a quantum computing system often results in a rapid decrease in performance, as it introduces new errors and makes it harder to interact with a single qubit without affecting some of the others. Researchers in the UK used modularization and optical networking to have ions in separate ion traps and vacuum systems, which are only connected through optical fibers. This approach limits crosstalk between qubits, retaining only interactions that are desirable and can be controlled by […]
New type of superconductor identified
Science Daily September 21, 2020 Strontium ruthenate (Sr2RuO4) has stood as the leading candidate for a spin-triplet superconductor for 26 years. Using resonant ultrasound spectroscopy an international team of researchers (USA – Cornell University, Florida State University, Germany, Japan) measured the entire symmetry-resolved elastic tensor Sr2RuO4 through the superconducting transition. They found a thermodynamic discontinuity in the shear elastic modulus which implies that the superconducting order parameter has two components, a two-component p-wave order parameter. As this order parameter appears to have been precluded by recent NMR experiments, they suggest that two other two-component order parameters are now the prime […]
Physicists create turnstile for photons
Phys.org September 22, 2020 If the quantum emitter is excited with laser light and fluoresces, it will always emit exactly one photon with each quantum leap. For this type of source, it is then still a challenge to efficiently “feed” the emitted photons into a glass fiber to send as many of them as possible to the receiver. An international team of researchers (Austria, Germany, Denmark) generated strongly correlated photon states using only weak coupling and taking advantage of dissipation. An ensemble of non-interacting waveguide-coupled atoms induces correlations between simultaneously arriving photons through collectively enhanced nonlinear interactions. These correlated photons […]
Physicists develop printable organic transistors
Nanowerk September 22, 2020 Conventional horizontal organic thin-film transistors are very slow due to the hopping-transport in organic semiconductors, so they cannot be used for applications requiring high frequencies. Researchers in Germany have developed powerful vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes characterized by a high switching frequency and an adjustable threshold voltage. With these developments even single transistors can be used to represent different logical states (AND, NOT, NAND). Furthermore, the adjustable threshold voltage ensures signal integrity and low power consumption. In the future, these transistors could make it possible to realize even sophisticated electronic functions such as […]
Scientists identify solid electrolyte materials that boost lithium-ion battery performance
TechXplore September 22, 2020 To find reliable solid electrolytes a team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, industry) trained a computer algorithm to screen more than 12,000 lithium-containing compounds in a materials database. Within minutes the algorithm identified approximately 20 promising materials, including four little-known compounds made of lithium, boron and sulfur. They studied four compounds using density functional theory, which simulates how the materials would behave at the atomic level. Their findings include the following: Lithium-boron-sulfur electrolytes could be about twice as stable as the leading solid electrolytes; When mixed together, the four lithium-boron-sulfur compounds would continue functioning […]
Single photon emission from isolated monolayer islands of InGaN
Phys.org September 23, 2020 An international team of researchers (China, Japan, Germany) developed a novel type of quantum emitter formed from spatially separated monolayer islands of InGaN sandwiched in a GaN matrix. They first grew a planar structure of InGaN monolayer islands using molecular beam epitaxy, and then patterned the sample into pillars using nanoimprint lithography and inductively-coupled plasma reactive-ion etching. Detailed optical analysis of the emission properties of the isolated monolayer islands showed that the main emission line could be spectrally filtered to act as a bright, and fast single photon emitter at a wavelength of ~ 400 nm, […]
This tiny device can scavenge wind energy from the breeze you make when you walk
TechXplore September 23, 2020 A breeze as gentle as 1.6 m/s (3.6 mph) was enough to power the triboelectric nanogenerator designed by an international team of researchers (China, Singapore). The nanogenerator performs at its best when wind velocity is between 4 to 8 m/s (8.9 to 17.9 mph), a speed that allows the two plastic strips to flutter in sync.[see embedded video]. The device also has a high wind-to-energy conversion efficiency of 3.23%. Currently the device can power up 100 LED lights and temperature sensors. Unlike wind turbines, this device is made of low-cost materials and it can be safely […]