Phys.org March 4, 2020 Catalytic enhancement of chemical reactions via heterogeneous materials occurs through stabilization of transition states at designed active sites. An international team of researchers (University of Minnesota, University of Delaware, UC Santa Barbara, UMass Amherst) designed a new class of catalysts that greatly accelerated the primary surface reactions using waves. When the applied wave frequency and amplitude match up with characteristics of the primary chemistry, the reaction becomes thousands of times faster than all other side reactions and essentially stops making any errors to side products. The researchers were able to broadly explain the relationship between different […]
First bufferless lasers grown directly on silicon wafers in Si-photonics
Nanowerk March 4, 2020 In conventional approaches of integrating III-V lasers on Si thick III-V buffers up to a few micrometers are used to reduce the defect densities, which posses huge challenges for efficient light interfacing between the epitaxial III-V lasers and the Si-based waveguides. Based on numerical simulations an international team of researchers (China, Hong Kong) designed and fabricated a novel growth scheme to eliminate the requirement of thick III-V buffers and thus promoted efficient light coupling into the Si-waveguides. They demonstrated the 1.5 µm III-V lasers directly grown on the industry-standard 220 nm SOI wafers using metal organic […]
How a new quantum approach can develop faster algorithms to deduce complex networks
EurekAlert March 3, 2020 Complex networks form the basis of various applications in virtually all fields of science. To analyze and manipulate these networks, specific “search” algorithms are required. But conventional search algorithms are slow and, when dealing with large networks, require a long computational time. To develop more efficient quantum algorithms researchers in Japan performed numerical simulations on some basic fractal lattices to try to find out the relationship between the number of vertices and the optimal computational time in a quantum walk search. They confirmed that the scaling law for some fractal lattices varied according to their spectral […]
Longest microwave quantum link
Phys.org March 5, 2020 Currently there are computers with a few dozen qubits, but several hundreds of thousands of them are almost impossible to accommodate in existing devices as they need to be cooled down to temperatures close to the absolute zero of -273,15 degrees Celsius. To connect two superconducting quantum chips to exchange superposition states between them with minimal decoherence researchers in Germany cooled the chips to a few hundredths of a degree above absolute zero and demonstrated that the quantum link can be sufficiently cooled down to reliably transmit quantum information between two quantum chips. They will report […]
Magnetic whirls in future data storage devices
Eurekalert March 3, 2020 Researchers in Germany discovered that skyrmions and antiskyrmions are stabilized in different materials by a magnetic interaction that is directly tied to the structure of the host material. However, what was previously overlooked is that the magnetic dipoles also significantly interact with each other via their dipole-dipole interaction. This interaction always prefers skyrmions. For this reason, even “antiskyrmion materials” can exhibit skyrmions (but not vice versa). This happens preferably as the temperature is lowered. At a critical transition temperature, the two distinct objects coexist. The finding allows for an advanced version of the racetrack memory data […]
Manipulating atoms to make better superconductors
Science Daily March 3, 2020 The creation of collective behavior is the fundamental building block from which superconductivity emerges. A team of researchers in the US (University of Illinois at Chicago, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University) had theoretically predicted in a Kondo droplet, for certain distances between the cobalt atoms, the nanoscopic system should start to exhibit collective behavior, while for other distances, it should not. They confirmed the predictions by experiments that showed that collective behavior appears in Kondo droplets containing as little as 37 cobalt atoms. It allows us to move one step closer to developing the […]
Micromotors get supercharged with three ‘engines’
Nanowerk March 4, 2020 Micromotors are tiny tools that convert stimuli, such as chemical fuel, light, magnetic fields or sound, into motion to perform tasks. They are powered by one or two of these stimuli. To make a “supercharged” micromotor with three engines researchers in Spain coated polystyrene microspheres with layers of gold and 2D nanomaterials; they attached three different nanoparticles that functioned as engines making the micromotors responsive to hydrogen peroxide, magnets and light. When the micromotors were exposed to all three stimuli simultaneously, the speed increased by as much as 73% over that attained with micromotors containing only […]
A new AI chip can perform image recognition tasks in nanoseconds
MIT Technology Review March 4, 2020 Visual information is captured by a frame-based camera, converted into a digital format and processed afterwards using a machine-learning algorithm such as an artificial neural network (ANN). The large amount of data passed through the entire signal chain, however, results in low frame rates and high-power consumption. Researchers in Austria built a sensor based on a reconfigurable two-dimensional semiconductor photodiode array, and the synaptic weights of the network are stored in a continuously tunable photoresponsivity matrix. The sensor can itself constitute an ANN that can simultaneously sense and process optical images without latency. They […]
New optical system could lead to devices that can recognize objects instantly
Technology.org March 5, 2020 Diffractive optical network is a recently introduced optical computing framework that merges wave optics with deep-learning methods to design optical neural networks. Previous diffractive approaches employed monochromatic coherent light as the illumination source. Researchers at UCLA designed a broadband diffractive optical neural network that simultaneously processes a continuum of wavelengths generated by a temporally incoherent broadband source to all-optically perform a specific task learned using deep learning. They fabricated and tested seven different multi-layer, diffractive optical systems that transform the optical wavefront generated by a broadband THz pulse to realize a series of tunable, single-passband and […]
Potential superbug-killing compound
Science Daily March 3, 2020 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Cincinnati, University of North Carolina, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bowling Green State University, Canada) has developed a drug, AB569, which contains ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (commonly referred to as EDTA) and acidified nitrite which work together to effectively kill disease-causing bacteria without harming human cells. The lab tests of AB569 showed promising results in treating priority pathogens, plus additional bacteria that cause foodborne illness such as E. coli and Listeria…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE