Nanowerk August 13, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pennsylvania, Industry, UCLA, Singapore) demonstrated that nanostructured, multilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) by themselves provide an ideal platform for excitation and control of excitonic modes, paving the way to exciton-photonics. Inherently strong TMDC exciton absorption resonances may be completely suppressed due to excitation of hybrid light-matter states and their interference. The work paves the way to the next generation of integrated exciton optoelectronic nano-devices and applications in light generation, computing, and sensing…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
The Force of Nothingness Has Been Used to Manipulate Objects
Science Alert August 7, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – UC Merced, Australia) demonstrates a way to realize a Casimir spring and engineer dilution in macroscopic optomechanics by coupling a metallic SiN membrane to a photonic re-entrant cavity. The attraction of the spatially localized Casimir spring mimics a non-contacting boundary condition giving rise to increased strain and acoustic coherence through dissipation dilution. This provides a way to manipulate phonons via thermal photons leading to ‘in situ’ reconfigurable mechanical states, to reduce loss mechanisms and to create additional types of acoustic nonlinearity—all at room temperature…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Glass blowing inspires new class of quantum sensors
Nanowerk August 12, 2020 By embedding micron-scale diamond particles at an annular interface within the cross section of a silicate glass fiber, researchers in Australia demonstrated a robust fiber material capable of sensing magnetic fields. NV centers in the diamond microcrystals are well preserved throughout the fiber drawing process. The hybrid fiber presents a low propagation loss of ∼4.0 dB/m in the NV emission spectral window, permitting remote monitoring of the optically detected magnetic resonance signals. They demonstrated NV-spin magnetic resonance readout through 50 cm of fiber. The study paves a way for the scalable fabrication of fiber-based diamond sensors […]
Past evidence supports complete loss of Arctic sea-ice by 2035
Science Daily August 10, 2020 Climate model simulations have previously failed to capture elevated temperatures, possibly because they were unable to correctly capture Last Interglacial (LIG) sea-ice changes. An international team of researchers (UK, Canada, USA- University of Washington) shows that the latest version of the fully coupled UK Hadley Center climate model (HadGEM3) simulates a more accurate Arctic LIG climate, including elevated temperatures. Improved model physics, including a sophisticated sea-ice melt-pond scheme, results in a complete simulated loss of Arctic sea ice in summer during the LIG, which has yet to be simulated in past generations of models. This […]
Quantum researchers create an error-correcting cat
Science Daily August 12, 2020 Until now, quantum researchers have tried to fix errors by adding greater redundancy. Instead of multiple physical qubits needed to maintain one effective qubit, an international team of researchers (Switzerland, USA – UT Austin) propose a single cat qubit that can prevent phase flips all by itself. It encodes an effective qubit into superpositions of two states within a single electronic circuit — in their case a superconducting microwave resonator whose oscillations corresponds to the two states of the cat qubit. They applied microwave frequency signals to a device that is not significantly more complicated […]
Scientists develop first quantum algorithm to characterize noise across large systems
EurekAlert August 10, 2020 Ability to build large-scale quantum computers depends on the ability to characterize quantum noise reliably and efficiently with high precision. An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – Yale University, Canada) has developed a protocol and implemented it in a 14-qubit superconducting quantum architecture. They show how to construct a quantum noise correlation matrix allowing the easy visualization of correlations between all pairs of qubits, enabling the discovery of long-range two-qubit correlations in the 14-qubit device. Their results pave the way for noise metrology in next-generation quantum devices, calibration in the presence of crosstalk, and customized […]
Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state
Phys.org August 10, 2020 According to quantum mechanics, the final irreversibility of conceptual time reversal requires extremely intricate and implausible scenarios that are unlikely to spontaneously occur in nature. Physicists had previously shown that it is possible to design an algorithm to artificially reverse a time arrow to a known or given state within an IBM quantum computer. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Google, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, Russia, Spain) built on their previous work to develop a technical method to reverse the temporal evolution of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. The technical work will […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of August 7, 2020
01. Greater connectedness in remote areas: A Ka-band transceiver for satellite 02. Image cloaking tool thwarts facial recognition programs 03. NTU Singapore scientists build ultra-high-speed Terahertz wireless chip 04. Physicists find misaligned carbon sheets yield unparalleled properties 05. Scientists find way to track space junk in daylight 06. An electrical switch for magnetism 07. Break it down: A new way to address common computing problem 08. Scientists discover new class of semiconducting entropy-stabilized materials 09. Novel approach improves graphene-based supercapacitors 10. Whitepaper evaluates opportunities and risks of nanomaterials And others… Acoustic tweezers move objects in the body remotely Has the […]
Acoustic tweezers move objects in the body remotely
Physics World August 4, 2020 Researchers at the University of Washington designed ultrasound beams of specific shapes by numerical modeling and a phased array. The beams were shown to levitate and electronically steer solid objects (3-mm-diameter glass spheres) along preprogrammed paths in a water bath, and in the urinary bladders of live pigs. Deviation from the intended path was on average <10%. No injury was found on the bladder wall or intervening tissue. The work provides a framework for medical applications, as well as nonmedical uses that require noninvasively moving sizable, dense objects in a free field or within a […]
Break it down: A new way to address common computing problem
Science Daily August 5, 2020 The volume of data, inadequate computational resources to handle an oversized problem, security and privacy concerns are some of the challenges in solving large-scale linear inverse problems (LIP). Researchers at Washington University have developed the parallel residual projection (PRP), a parallel computational framework involving the decomposition of a large-scale LIP into sub-problems of low complexity and the fusion of the sub-problem solutions to form the solution to the original LIP. They analyzed the convergence properties of the PRP and accentuate its benefits through its application to complex problems of network inference and gravimetric survey. They […]