Phys.org December 17, 2021 Researchers in the Netherlands have demonstrated that by illuminating a solution of barium carbonate and silicon with UV light they can control when and which structures arise at the micrometer scale. As soon as barium carbonate crystals form in the solution, the silicon joins in and precipitates together with the crystals, thus giving rise to the unusual shapes. A tiny bit of CO2 gas in the solution starts this process. If one could ensure that CO2 arises at the exact location and time desired, this would result in an on-off switch for the chemical reaction. Using […]
Tag Archives: S&T the Netherlands
Tuning transparency and opacity
Phys.org October 18, 2021 Recently, a new type of wavefront shaping was introduced where the extinction is manipulated instead of the scattered intensity. The underlying idea is that upon changing the phases or the amplitudes of incident beams, the total extinction will change due to interference described by the cross terms between different incident beams. Researchers in the Netherlands have experimentally demonstrated the mutual extinction and transparency effects in scattering media a human hair and a silicon bar. They sent two light beams with a variable mutual angle on the sample. Depending on the relative phase of the incident beams, they […]
‘Liquid’ light shows social behaviour
Phys.org October 7, 2021 Researchers in the Netherlands investigated the Bose-Einstein condensation of a photonic Bose gas in an environment with controlled dissipation and feedback. They created a micro-size mirror with channels in which photons flow like a liquid. They showed that by adjusting their frequency Bose-Einstein condensates naturally try to avoid particle loss and destructive interference in their environment. Their experiments revealed physical mechanisms involved in the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which typically remain hidden when the system is close to thermal equilibrium. They demonstrated the effect even at room temperature. Their measurements offer a highly systematic picture […]
Steering light to places it isn’t supposed to go
Phys.org April 28, 2021 The best materials for housing qubits and certain other optically activated objects typically reflect incident light. By stopping externally applied light from reaching its target, this reflectivity presents a challenge for controlling optically integrated devices. Researchers in the Netherlands have demonstrated a way of guiding light along an arbitrary path through a material by patterning the light’s phase. They shone an infrared beam into the edge of a 2D silicon crystal containing a periodic arrangement of air-filled pores. A large fraction of the light was reflected back along the beam, but because of disorder in the […]
Researchers establish the first entanglement-based quantum network
Phys.org April 15, 2021 Researchers in the Netherlands have built a three-node entanglement-based quantum network by combining remote quantum nodes based on diamond communication qubits into a scalable phase-stabilized architecture, supplemented with a robust memory qubit and local quantum logic. They achieved real-time communication and feed-forward gate operations across the network. They demonstrated two quantum network protocols without postselection: the distribution of genuine multipartite entangled states across the three nodes, and entanglement swapping through an intermediary node. The work establishes a key platform for exploring, testing, and developing multinode quantum network protocols and a quantum network control stack…read more. TECHNICAL […]
The first steps toward a quantum brain
EurekAlert February 1, 2021 The quest to implement machine learning algorithms in hardware has focused on combining various materials to create device functionality. This approach limits functionality, efficiency, complicates scaling and on-chip learning. Researchers in the Netherlands created an atomic spin system that emulates a Boltzmann machine directly in the orbital dynamics of one well-defined material system. They fabricated the prerequisite tunable multi-well energy landscape by gating patterned atomic ensembles using scanning tunneling microscopy. The anisotropic behaviour of black phosphorus, provided plasticity with multi-valued and interlinking synapses that led to tunable probability distributions. They observed an autonomous reorganization of the […]
An 11-atom sensor sheds light on the quantum world
Nanowerk October 14, 2020 Researchers in the Netherlands developed a device composed of individual Fe atoms that allows for remote detection of spin dynamics. They have characterized the device and used it to detect the presence of spin waves originating from an excitation induced by the scanning tunneling microscope tip several nanometres away; this may be extended to much longer distances. The device contains a memory element that can be consulted seconds after detection, similar in functionality to e.g. a single photon detector. They performed statistical analysis of the responsiveness to remote spin excitations and corroborated the results using basic […]
Detecting hidden nanostructures by converting light into sound
Nanowerk July 8, 2020 Using laser-induced, extremely high-frequency ultrasound researchers in the Netherlands detected diffraction gratings buried below a stack of tens of 18-nm-thick SiO2 and Si3N4 layers and an optically opaque metal layer. The shape and amplitude of a buried metal grating were encoded on the spatial phase of the reflected acoustic wave. They showed that the complex shape of the diffracted signal as a function of time can be reproduced using a comprehensive numerical model that includes the generation, propagation, and optical detection of the acoustic waves. The results show that laser-induced ultrasound is a promising technique for […]
Fifty perfect photons for ‘quantum supremacy’
Phys.org June 23, 2020 About 50 quantum building blocks are needed to solve problems whether they are in the form of photons or qubits. Photons can operate at room temperatures and they are more stable. But they must be perfect to get to the critical number of 50. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Germany) found that by playing with the crystal structure of the light source and dividing them into domains, it was possible to produce light with the desired properties. Varying the domains, however, is required for better tailoring of the light properties…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
A quantum memory that operates at telecom wavelengths
Phys.org June 15, 2020 Researchers in the Netherlands designed and fabricated the fully engineerable, device with operational wavelength of 1550 nanometers to enable the system to work in the low-loss telecommunication band wavelength. The system’s optical and mechanical resonances are fully artificial. They were able to show that the memory has a satisfactory lifetime and coherence while successfully creating the superposition state. In future studies, they plan to gain a better understanding of why the de-phasing of a quantum state, to avoid having such a short coherence, understand the underlying microscopic mechanisms, and increase the overall efficiency of the memory. […]