Phys.org June 3, 2019 To fully understand the fundamental laws that prevent quantum communications to simultaneously achieve high rates and long distances, an international team of researchers (UK, USA – MIT) derived single-letter upper bounds for the end-to-end capacities achievable by the most general (adaptive) protocols of quantum and private communication, from a single repeater chain to an arbitrarily complex quantum network, where systems may be routed through single or multiple paths. They analytically established these capacities under fundamental noise models, including bosonic loss which is the most important for optical communications. The results provide the ultimate benchmarks for testing […]
Europe Has Invested €1 Billion Into Graphene—But For What?
IEEE Spectrum June 3, 2019 Six years ago, the EU embarked on an ambitious project to create a kind of Silicon Valley for graphene. Over 10 years to push graphene into commercial markets the project, Graphene Flagship would leverage €1 billion. In the past six years, the Graphene Flagship has spawned nine companies and 46 new graphene-based products. Despite these achievements, there remains a sense among critics that the wonder material has not lived up to expectations and the Flagship’s efforts have not done much to change that perception…read more.
Geoscience data group urges all scientific disciplines to make data open and accessible
EurekAlert June 4, 2019 According to a team of researchers in the US (AGU, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brandeis University, Columbia University, University of Virginia, industry) scientists don’t share data for many reasons. Those who create data rarely receive credit, and when they do, recognition is often limited to citations. Scant support is available for curating data. These issues span all disciplines, but conversations are disconnected. That’s why more than 100 repositories, communities, societies, institutions, infrastructures, individuals and publishers (including Springer Nature, the publishers of Nature) have signed up since last November to the Enabling FAIR Data Project’s Commitment Statement in […]
Hand-held scanner for detecting hazardous substances and explosives
Phys.org June 3, 2019 Researchers in Germany working under the EU project CHEQUERS www.chequers.eu combined very fast widely tunable quantum cascade lasers with adjusted transmission and receiver optics, fast IR detectors and a fitting control and detection software. The miniaturized quantum cascade laser with an external resonator can scan the whole spectral range of the QC laser chip within just a millisecond. The measuring principle is based on selective spectral lighting of the target in the wavelength range of 1000—1300 cm-1. The chemical substance is identified based on the intensity of the backscattered light and the illumination wavelength. The spectral […]
Hearing through your fingers: Device that converts speech
Medical Express June 3, 2019 An international team of researchers (Poland, Israel) hypothesized that they would be able to improve speech understanding under challenging conditions by exploiting the ability of the brain to integrate information coming simultaneously from different senses. They designed a minimalistic auditory-to-tactile sensory substitution device (SSD) that transforms low-frequency speech signals into tactile vibrations delivered on two fingertips. The reported improvement at the group level was 6 dB—a major difference considering that an increase of 10 dB represents a doubling of the perceived loudness. The device can provide immediate multisensory enhancement without any training. It has the […]
Household Radar Can See Through Walls and Knows How You’re Feeling
IEEE Spectrum May 30, 2019 Researchers at MIT have demonstrated a new technology that can infer a person’s emotions from RF signals reflected off a person’s body. EQ-Radio transmits an RF signal and analyzes its reflections off a person’s body to recognize his emotional state (happy, sad, etc.). The key enabler underlying EQ-Radio is a new algorithm for extracting the individual heartbeats from the wireless signal at an accuracy comparable to on-body ECG monitors. The resulting beats are then used to compute emotion-dependent features which feed a machine-learning emotion classifier. They describe the design and implementation of EQ-Radio, and demonstrate through […]
New way to protect against high-dose radiation damage discovered
Science Daily May 30, 2019 Exposure to high-dose irradiation (>10 gray) from the uncontrolled release of radioactive materials or intensive radiotherapy for cancer treatment can cause gastrointestinal syndrome (GIS), a lethal disorder affecting the intestinal structure. To assess medical countermeasures, it is essential to develop specific and robust animal models in which the relationship between radiation doses, GIS incidence, and severity can be correlated with the histopathology of the intestine. Researchers in Spain aim to understand cell biology and molecular events of GIS after radiation exposure by using a genetic GIS mouse model generated in their laboratory. This information will […]
Physicists ‘teleport’ logic operation between separated ions
Science Daily May 30, 2019 Teleportation of quantum data has been demonstrated previously with ions and a variety of other quantum systems. Now a team of researchers in the US (NIST, University of Colorado) teleported a quantum controlled-NOT (CNOT) logic operation, or logic gate, between two beryllium ion qubits located more than 340 micrometers apart in separate zones of an ion trap, a distance that rules out any substantial direct interaction. A “messenger” pair of entangled magnesium ions is used to transfer information between the beryllium ions (infographic ). They found that its teleported CNOT process entangled the two magnesium ions […]
Physicists can predict the jumps of Schrodinger’s cat (and finally save it)
Phys.org June 3, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – Yale University, New Zealand) used a special approach to indirectly monitor a superconducting artificial atom, with three microwave generators irradiating the atom enclosed in a 3-D cavity made of aluminum. Microwave radiation stirs the artificial atom as it is simultaneously being observed, resulting in quantum jumps. They amplified the tiny quantum signal of these jumps and monitored it in real time which enabled the researchers to see a sudden absence of detection photons which was a warning of a quantum jump. Despite its observation, coherence increased during the jump. […]
Record-breaking chaotic data transmission
Phys.org May 29, 2019 Chaotic optical secure communications (COSC) are a kind of fast-speed hardware encryption technique at the physical layer. Researchers in China have developed a scheme of long-haul COSC, where the bit rate reaches 1.25 Gbits/s and the transmission distance up to 143 km. The low-cost device is built with off-the-shelf optical components and does not require dispersion compensating fibre (DCF) or forward-error correction. The results show that high-quality chaotic synchronisation can be maintained both in time- and frequency-domain, even after 143 km transmission; the bandwidth of the transmitter is enlarged by the external optical injection, which leads […]