Phys.org October 19, 2022 In many materials the ferroelectric behavior is suppressed at the few-nanometer scale. A team of researchers in the US (UC Berkeley, State University of Pennsylvania, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) found that ferroelectricity emerges in zirconium dioxide when it is grown extremely thin, approximately 1-2 nanometers in thickness. Notably, the ferroelectric behavior continues to its near-atomic-scale thickness limit of roughly half a nanometer. This approach to exploit three-dimensional centrosymmetric materials deposited down to the two-dimensional thickness limit, particularly within this model fluorite-structure system that possesses unconventional ferroelectric size effects, offers substantial promise for electronics, […]
Tag Archives: Computing
Researchers discover a material that can learn like the brain
Nanowerk August 22, 2022 MOS junctions can provide a variety of functionalities, from memory to computing. The technology, however, faces constraints in terms of further miniaturization and compatibility with post–von Neumann computing architectures. Manipulation of structural—rather than electronic—states could provide a path to ultrascaled low-power functional devices, but the electrical control of such states is challenging. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, South Korea) report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing. The states can be arbitrarily manipulated on short timescales and tracked beyond 10,000 s after excitation, exhibiting features […]
Record-Breaking Experiment Could Solve a Huge Challenge in Quantum Computing
Science Alert August 8, 2022 Strong interactions between two single atoms have not been harnessed for ultrafast quantum operations due to the stringent requirements on the fluctuation of the atom positions and the necessary excitation strength. Researchers in Japan have developed a technique to trap and cool atoms to the motional quantum ground state of holographic optical tweezers, which allows control of the inter-atomic distance down to 1.5 μm with a quantum-limited precision of 30 nm. Then they used ultrashort laser pulses to excite a pair of these nearby atoms far beyond the Rydberg blockade regime and performed Ramsey interferometry with attosecond […]
Researcher is studying materials whose traits resemble those of the human brain
Phys.org August 3, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – Purdue University, New York University, UC San Diego, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern, UC Santa Barbara, NIST, UC Davis, Brookhaven National Laboratory, France) summarizes and reflects on efforts to find “quantum materials” that can mimic brain function. CMOS has been engineered to keep different information states well-separated. It is not very well-designed for doing things where there is a lot of randomness and fluctuations. The human brain, on the other hand, can easily handle such tricky tasks while consuming dramatically less energy than modern computers. According to […]
Unlocking the recipe for designer magnetic particles for next generation computing technologies
Phys.org August 4, 2022 Recently ensembles of chiral spin textures, consisting of skyrmions and magnetic stripes, are shown to possess rich interactions with potential for device applications. However, several fundamental aspects of chiral spin texture phenomenology remain to be elucidated, including their domain wall (DW) structure, thermodynamic stability, and morphological transitions. An international team of researchers (Singapore, USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has shown the evolution of these textural characteristics unveiled on a tunable multilayer platform using a combination of full-field electron and soft X-ray microscopies with numerical simulations. They demonstrated the increasing chiral interactions, the emergence of Néel […]
An AI Just Independently Discovered Alternate Physics
Science Alert July 29, 2022 Despite the prevalence of computing power and artificial intelligence, the process of identifying the hidden state variables themselves has resisted automation. Most data-driven methods for modelling physical phenomena still rely on the assumption that the relevant state variables are already known. A longstanding question is whether it is possible to identify state variables from only high-dimensional observational data. Researchers at Columbia University proposed a principle for determining how many state variables an observed system is likely to have, and what these variables might be. They demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach using video recordings of […]
World’s first ultra-fast photonic computing processor using polarization
Phys.org June 15, 2022 While wavelength-selective systems have widely proliferated, polarization-addressable active photonics has not seen notable progress, primarily because tunable and polarization-selective nanostructures have been elusive. Researchers in the UK have introduced hybridized-active-dielectric (HAD) nanowires to achieve polarization-selective tunability. They demonstrated the ability to use polarization as a parameter to selectively modulate the conductance of individual nanowires within a multi-nanowire system. By using polarization as the tunable vector, they showed matrix-vector multiplication in a nanowire device configuration. According to the researchers while the HAD nanowires use phase-change materials as the active material, this concept can be generalized to other […]
Physicists Developed a Superconductor Circuit Long Thought to Be Impossible
Science Alert April 27, 2022 An international team of researchers (Germany, China, the Netherlands, USA – Johns Hopkins University) fabricated an inversion symmetry breaking van der Waals heterostructure of NbSe2/Nb3Br8/NbSe2. They demonstrated that even without a magnetic field, the junction can be superconducting with a positive current while being resistive with a negative current. The ΔIc behaviour (the difference between positive and negative critical currents) with magnetic field is symmetric and Josephson coupling was proved through the Fraunhofer pattern. They achieved stable half-wave rectification of a square-wave excitation with a very low switching current density, high rectification ratio and high […]
In race to build quantum computing hardware, silicon begins to shine
Phys.org April 6, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (Princeton University, Sandia National Laboratory) used a two qubits silicon device and forced them to interact. The spin state of each electron can be used as a qubit and the interaction between the electrons can entangle these qubits. To do this they constructed a cage in the form of a wafer-thin semiconductor made primarily out of silicon. At the top of the cage they patterned little electrodes, which create the electrostatic potential used to corral the electron. Two of these cages put together, separated by a barrier, or gate, […]
Printing circuits on rare nanomagnets puts a new spin on computing
Phys.org March 28, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Finland) combined theoretical and experimental work to fabricate and observe the artificial spin glass as a proof-of-principle. Hopfield neural network mathematically models associative memory to guide the disorder of the artificial spin systems. They performed temperature-dependent imaging of thermally driven moment fluctuations within these networks and observed characteristic features of a two-dimensional Ising spin glass. They observed clear signatures of the hard-to-observe rugged spin glass free energy in the form of sub-aging, out-of-equilibrium autocorrelations and a transition from stable […]