Science Daily November 27, 2018 High levels of radiation would modify the optical properties of silicon in the devices, leading to incorrect readings. NIST test results indicate the sensors could be customized for measuring radiation dose in both industrial applications and clinical radiotherapy. Researchers at NIST examined the impact of cobalt-60 γ-ray radiation up to 1 megagray (MGy) absorbed dose on silicon photonic devices. They did not find any systematic impact of radiation on passivated devices, indicating the durability of passivated silicon devices under harsh conditions…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
On the cusp of valleytronics
Nanowerk November 30, 2018 According to researchers in Singapore information can be transmitted by controlling an electron’s association with a valley — a manipulation that can be achieved using electric fields, magnetic fields and circularly polarised light. As the valley is a property of the whole material, the valley states are destroyed only if the material is significantly modified or ceases to exist. Therefore, encoding information onto valley states should be more enduring due to the unique coupling of electron spin to valley. They are engineering a number of new and useful 2D semiconductors for this technology by adjusting their […]
New quantum materials could take computers beyond the semiconductor era
Berkeley News December 3, 2018 A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, industry) propose a way to turn multiferroics and topological materials, into logic and memory devices that will be 10 to 100 times more energy-efficient than foreseeable improvements to current microprocessors. MESO is based on a multiferroic material consisting of bismuth, iron and oxygen (BiFeO3) that is both magnetic and ferroelectric. They report that they have reduced the voltage needed for multiferroic magneto-electric switching from 3 volts to 500 millivolts and predict that it should be possible to reduce this to 100 millivolts: one-fifth to one-tenth that […]
New device for manipulating and moving tiny objects with light
Science Daily November 27, 2018 An international team of researchers (South Africa, USA – MIT) has built and demonstrated a vector holographic optical trapping and tweezing system which allows micrometer sized particles, such as biological cells, to be captured and manipulated only with light. They showed how to create and control any pattern of light holographically, and then used this to form a new optical trapping and tweezing device. The device can work with both the traditional laser beams as well as more complex vector beams. The new device can be useful in single cell studies in biology and medicine, […]
A Mysterious Seismic Wave Recently Shook Earth, And Scientists Can’t Explain It
Science Alert November 29, 2018 While the cause of this mysterious disturbance remains unknown, it’s somehow linked to an ongoing seismic swarm that’s been rumbling the archipelago of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean for several months. The researchers’ best guess is the anomalous vibration was also linked to volcanic activity, perhaps due to a huge movement of magma under the Indian Ocean. GPS readings indicate that since July – after the swarm began – the island has shifted approximately 60 mm (2.4 in) to the east and 30 mm (1.2 in) south. According to one analysis, this movement could be due […]
Innate ‘fingerprint’ could detect tampered steel parts
Science Daily November 28, 2018 All materials typically display some variation in their microstructure simply as a result of the manufacturing process, thus providing the potential that Barkhausen noise measurements between nominally similar components will be unique. Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have demonstrated that Barkhausen noise measurements are both repeatable in time for a single sample made from a ferromagnetic material, and unique across several instances of nominally similar samples. As the method inherently results in a time series measurement at each point on a sample, it is expected to have far higher dimensionality than physically similar […]
Harvard Scientists Will Actually Launch a Geoengineering Experiment Next Year
Science Alert December 4, 2018 The project – called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) – is part of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. To cool down the surface of the planet, in the experiment Harvard University researchers will fly a high-altitude balloon up to the stratosphere, at an altitude of about 20 kilometres, and release a small aerosol plume of calcium carbonate that is expected to disperse into a perturbed air mass about 1 kilometre long and 100 metres in diameter. The balloon will then fly back and forth through this cloud repeatedly for about 24 hours, analysing the […]
To Crack the Toughest Optimization Problems, Just Add Lasers
IEEE Spectrum November 27, 2018 Although many complicated optimization problems can be tackled by optimization, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the methods we use to solve a large fraction of optimization problems. Many common optimization problems, including scheduling and route-finding problems, can be easily converted into Ising optimization problems. Researchers at Stanford University are working to build special-purpose optical machines to solve Ising optimization which is finding the lowest energy state of a collection of spins. Key to their prototype system’s ability to map a spin onto a pulse of light is an optical parametric […]
Computer hackers could be thwarted by new ‘deception consistency’ method
Science Daily November 28, 2018 When the attackers are trapped, they can only make observations that are consistent with what they have seen already so that they cannot recognize the deceptive environment. Researchers at NYSU at Binghamton used logic constraints to characterize an attacker’s best knowledge (either positive, negative, or uncertain). When migrating the attacker’s FTP connection into a contained environment, they use these logic constraints to instantiate a new FTP file system that is guaranteed free of inconsistency. In tests, they found that the participants’ chances of recognizing deceptive environments are close to random guesses. The technique may not […]
Companies fed up with crappy Wi-Fi are deploying 5G instead
MIT Technology Review November 28, 2018 5G is expected to popularize private cellular networks because it was designed with more capabilities, slash data transmission delays from about 30 milliseconds to less than one and it can be programmed to treat different types of data or equipment differently— favoring mission-critical devices so that they keep operating even if the rest of the network is disrupted. Automakers, oil companies, and shipping ports plan to build private 5G networks for faster, more reliable connectivity. Companies need networking equipment, software, and—most important—access to spectrum…read more.