IEEE Spectrum January 23, 2020 Small satellites in the low earth orbit depend on NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) to route signals from satellites to the correct ground stations when the satellite is on the other side of the earth. TDRSS is rarely accessible to companies, prohibitively expensive to use, and over 25 years old. To alleviate these problem a company in the US is creating a commercial replacement for TDRSS by building a constellation of many tiny satellites in LEO. The satellites will form the backbone of a space-based mesh network operating much like an Internet […]
China’s Next Five-Year Energy Plan Will Shape the Global Energy Future
Next Big Future January 23, 2020 The 14th Five-Year Plan will cover 2021-25. The full plan will be released around March 2021, but partial drafts and releases will be published in 2020. China is projected to reduce the proportion of coal in its energy mix to below 58% by 2020. There are proposals to set a target of coal usage at 55% of China’s energy mix by 2030 for the 14th five-year plan covering 2021-2025. Greenhouse gas emissions to peak around 2025-2030. In March the China Electricity Council suggested that coal-power capacity should grow to 1,300 GW by 2030. Hydropower […]
Detection of very high frequency magnetic resonance could revolutionize electronics
Phys.org January 27, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara) generated spin current in an antiferromagnet and were able to detect it electrically. They used terahertz radiation to pump up magnetic resonance in chromia to facilitate its detection. Although antiferromagnets are statically uninteresting, they are dynamically interesting. Electron spin precession in antiferromagnets is much faster than in ferromagnets, resulting in frequencies that are two-three orders of magnitude higher than the frequencies of ferromagnets—thus allowing faster information transmission…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
How to take a picture of a light pulse
Phys.org January 27, 2020 Measuring the shape of the laser light wave with high accuracy required for investigating materials to medical diagnostics requires a large, complex experimental setup. In their experiment an international team of researchers (Germany, Austria) hit a tiny crystal of silicon oxide with the laser pulse to be investigated. While this laser pulse penetrates the crystal, another strong infrared pulse is fired at the target changing the energy state of the electrons so that they become mobile. As soon as the electrons can move through the crystal, they are accelerated by the electric field of the first […]
Integrating microchips for electronic skin
Science Daily January 22, 2020 To closely replicate natural skin, it is necessary to interconnect a large number of individual sensors. An international team of researchers (Japan, Germany) developed a sensor system that consists of a 2 x 4 array of magnetic sensors, an organic bootstrap shift register, required for controlling the sensor matrix, and organic signal amplifiers. All electronic components are based on organic thin-film transistors and are integrated within a single platform. The researchers demonstrated that the system has a high magnetic sensitivity and can acquire the two-dimensional magnetic field distribution in real time and very robust against […]
A megalibrary of nanoparticles
Nanowerk January 23, 2020 There is a lot of interest in the world of nanoscience in making nanoparticles that combine several different materials. But the current process is complex, long and time consuming. Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have developed two design guidelines, based on interfacial reactivity and crystal structure relations that enable the rational synthesis of a heterostructured nanorod megalibrary. They defined synthetically feasible pathways to 65,520 distinct multicomponent metal sulfide nanorods having as many as 6 materials, 8 segments, and 11 internal interfaces by applying up to seven sequential cation-exchange reactions to copper sulfide nanorod precursors. They […]
Nano-thin flexible touchscreens could be printed like newspaper
Nanowerk January 24, 2020 Researchers in Australia used a thin film common in cell phone touchscreens and shrunk it from 3D to 2D, using liquid metal chemistry. They synthesized flexible two-dimensional indium tin oxide (ITO) using a low-temperature liquid metal printing technique. The approach can directly deposit monolayer or bilayer ITO onto desired substrates, with the resulting bilayer samples offering a transparency above 99.3% and a sheet with low resistance. To illustrate the capabilities of the technique, they developed a capacitive touch screen using centimetre-sized monolayer ITO sheets…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Nanoparticles of Fungal Spores Have Been Detected Floating in Our Atmosphere
Science Alert January 26, 2020 Aerosol nanoparticles play an important role in the climate system by affecting cloud formation and properties, as well as in human health because of their deep reach into lungs and the circulatory system. The sudden appearance of large numbers of atmospheric nanoparticles is commonly attributed to secondary formation from gas-phase precursors. Researchers at UC Irvine have detected a mode of fungal fragments with a mobility diameter of roughly 30 nm released in episodic bursts in ambient air over an agricultural area in northern Oklahoma. These events reached concentrations orders of magnitude higher than other reports […]
A new twist on quantum communication in fiber
Phys.org January 24, 2020 While Hilbert spaces with higher dimensionality it requires custom multimode fiber and limited by decoherence-induced mode coupling. An international team of researchers (China, South Africa) circumvented this by transporting multidimensional entangled states down conventional single-mode fiber (SMF). By entangling the spin-orbit degrees of freedom of a biphoton pair, passing the polarization (spin) photon down the SMF while accessing multiple orbital angular momentum (orbital) subspaces with the other, they realized multidimensional entanglement transport. They demonstrated transfer of multi-dimensional entanglement states over 250 m of single-mode fiber, showing that an infinite number of two-dimensional subspaces could be realized. […]
On the way to quantum networks
Phys.org January 24, 2020 Entanglement between stationary quantum memories and photonic channels is the essential resource for future quantum networks. Together with entanglement distillation, it will enable efficient distribution of quantum states. Researchers in Germany entangled a rubidium atom with a photon and were able to detect the entangled state—which now shares the quantum properties of both particles—after its passage through a 20-km coil of optic fiber. Rubidium atoms emit photons with a wavelength of 780 nanometers which is rapidly absorbed. They built a quantum frequency converter that was specifically designed to increase the wavelength of the emitted photons from […]