EurekAlert November 13, 2020 Current technology in LiDARS bounces the laser beams off moving mirrors, a mechanical method that results in slower scanning speeds and inaccuracies. Researchers in Japan have developed a new beam scanning device utilizing ‘photonic crystals’ whose lattice points can be arranged as nanoscale antennae. They found that by adjusting both position and size resulted in a seemingly random photonic crystal, producing an accurate beam without power loss. They called this a ‘dually modulated photonic crystal’. They showed that the scanner can generate beams in one hundred different directions: a resolution of 10×10. With further refinements, the […]
Tag Archives: S&T Japan
Ultra-fast polymer modulators that can take the heat
Science Daily November 13, 2020 Researchers in Japan took advantage of the high electro-optic activities, low dielectric constant, low propagation loss and ultra-high glass transition temperature of the developed side-chain electro-optic polymers to fabricate silicon-polymer hybrid modulator. It supports ultra-fast single-lane data rates up to 200 gigabits per second, excellent reliability, and exceptional signal fidelity at extremely high ambient temperatures up to 110 °C even after long-term exposure to high temperatures. It could provide ultra-fast and reliable interconnects for datacenters, 5G/B5G, autonomous driving, and aviation systems, effectively addressing the energy consumption issue for the next-generation optical communication…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL […]
Getting single-crystal diamond ready for electronics
Phys.org November 10, 2020 A limitation of silicon is that high temperatures damage which limits the operating speed of silicon-based electronics. Researchers in Japan fabricated a single-crystal diamond wafer and polished it using plasma-assisted polishing to be nearly atomically smooth. Common methods of polishing the surface are slow and damaging to the material. The polished surface was unaltered chemically. The only detected impurity was a small amount of nitrogen from the original wafer preparation. The procedure can help replace some of the silicon components of electronic devices with diamond…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
New approach to circuit compression could deliver real-world quantum computers years ahead of schedule
EurekAlert November 12, 2020 “Quantum advantage” has been achieved in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices in early proof-of-principle experiments. But the NISQ devices are still prone to lots of errors that accumulate during their operation. To negate the need for millions of physical qubits for a fault-tolerant computer researchers in Japan proposed the use of the ZX-calculus as an intermediate language for braided circuit compression in large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. According to the researchers by compressing quantum circuits, they could reduce the size of the quantum computer and its runtime, which in turn lessens the requirement for error protection…read more. […]
Scientists in Japan Just Found a Detailed Record of Earth’s Last Magnetic Switcharoo
Science Alert October 31, 2020 Every 200,000 to 300,000 years, Earth’s magnetic poles reverse. The last reversal was unusual because for some reason, the poles have remained oriented the way they are now for about three-quarters of a million years. Researchers in Japan collected new samples and conducted paleo- and rock-magnetic analyses of samples from the Chiba composite section which is considered to contain the most detailed marine sedimentary record of the Matuyama-Brunhes geomagnetic reversal. It provides the most reliable chronostratigraphic framework of the time period around the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. According to their study it took about 20,000 years, including […]
AI taught to rapidly assess disaster damage so humans know where help is needed most
Asia Research October 1, 2020 Using convolutional neural network (CNN) a team of researchers in Japan trained an AI using post-disaster aerial images to accurately determine how battered the buildings are. It works by classifying buildings as collapsed, non-collapsed, or blue tarp-covered based on the seven damage scales (D0-D6) used in the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes. Based on the photos used to train the AI, they found that the blue tarp-covered category predominantly represented D2-D3 levels of devastation. When the system was tested on post-disaster aerial images of the September 2019 typhoon that hit Chiba, results showed that damage levels of […]
Superconductors are super resilient to magnetic fields
Phys.org September 7, 2020 It was once assumed that the superconducting-to-normal transition caused by a magnetic field could not be reversed easily. However, it has been known for a long time from experiments that, if you remove the magnetic field, a current-carrying superconductor can, in fact, be returned to its previous state without loss of energy. Researchers in Japan proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon. In the superconducting state, electrons pair up and move in sync, but the true cause of this synchronized motion is due to Berry connection, characterized by the topological quantum number. It is an integer […]
A new iron based super elastic alloy capable of withstanding extreme temperatures
EurekAlert August 20, 2020 Researchers in Japan have discovered novel iron-based super elastic alloy (SEA) made of Fe-Mn-Al-Cr-Ni whose controllable temperature dependence goes from positive to negative, it is capable of withstanding extreme temperatures -both high and low. Increasing the amount of Chromium allowed the researchers to change the temperature dependence from a positive to a negative. Balancing the Chromium content resulted in zero temperature dependence with the critical stress remaining almost constant at various temperatures. The discovery possesses wide-spread application for outer-space exploration given the large temperature fluctuations that occur. It can potentially be used in tension braces in […]
Greater connectedness in remote areas: A Ka-band transceiver for satellite communications
EurekAlert August 4, 2020 The transceiver developed by researchers in Japan using standard CMOS technology uses 27-31 GHz frequency range for uplink and 17-21 GHz range for downlink. A high-quality transformer is used to achieve efficient power use and high linearity in transmission, resulting in lower distortion during transmission. Two RX channels allows for receiving signals from two satellites simultaneously in parallel using either two independent polarization modes or two different frequencies. It can perform adjacent-channel interference cancellation increasing the dynamic range of the system, thus allowing it to operate correctly even in less-than-ideal scenarios with stronger noise and interference. […]
‘Seeing’ and ‘manipulating’ functions of living cells
EurekAlert July 22, 2020 Researchers in Japan investigated the effect of indentation speed on the cell membrane perforation of living HeLa cells based on highly localized photochemical oxidation with catalytic titanium dioxide functionalized AFM probe. Based on force–distance curves obtained during the indentation process, the probability of cell membrane perforation, penetration force, and cell viability was determined quantitatively. They demonstrated that the intracellular TERS imaging has the potential to visualize distinctly different features in Raman spectra between the nucleus and the cytoplasm of a single living cell and to analyze the dynamic behavior of biomolecules inside a living cell…read more. […]