EurekAlert June 22, 2020 The rapid growth in the amount of data being transferred within data centres creates challenges for the future scalability of electronically switched data-centre networks. As an alternative photonic integration platforms have been demonstrated with nanosecond-scale optical switching times. However, switching times are limited by the clock and data recovery time. Researchers in the UK have shown that using the measurement and storage of clock phase values in a synchronized network, the data recovery times can be under 625 ps. Their approach uses the measurement and storage of clock phase values in a synchronized network to simplify clock […]
Tag Archives: S&T UK
Configurable circuit technology poised to expand silicon photonic applications
Science Daily May 28, 2020 Researchers in the UK have designed and fabricated building blocks for the configurable circuits in the form of erasable directional couplers (DCs) using ion implanted waveguides. Once the configurable/one-time programmable (OTP) silicon photonic circuit is programmed, its signal routing is retained without the need for additional power consumption. This technology can potentially enable a multi-purpose design of photonic chips for a range of different applications and performance requirements, as it can be programmed for each specific application after chip fabrication. Proof-of-principle demonstrators in the form of generic 1×4 and 2×2 programmable switching circuits were fabricated […]
Quantum leap: Photon discovery is a major step toward at-scale quantum technologies
EurekAlert May 20, 2020 Architectures for photonic quantum computing place stringent demands on high quality information carriers. An international team of researchers (UK, Italy) has fabricated on-chip photon sources and demonstrated that they meet the computing requirements. The photon sources are fabricated in silicon using mature processes and exploit a dual-mode pump-delayed excitation scheme to engineer the emission of spectrally pure photon pairs through inter-modal spontaneous four-wave mixing in low-loss spiraled multi-mode waveguides. They measured a spectral purity of 0.9904 ± 0.0006, a mutual indistinguishability of 0.987 ± 0.002, and >90% intrinsic heralding efficiency and on-chip quantum interference with a visibility of 0.96 ± 0.02 between […]
Chip-based devices improve practicality of quantum-secured communication
Science Daily March 19, 2020 A team of researchers in the UK present secure key exchange up to 200 km while removing all side-channels from the measurement system. They used mass-manufacturable, monolithically integrated transmitters that represent an accessible, quantum-ready communication platform. This work demonstrates a network topology that allows secure equipment sharing which is accessible with a cost-effective transmitter, significantly reducing the barrier for widespread uptake of quantum-secured communication…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Amazon rainforest could be gone within a lifetime
Science Daily March 10, 2020 Regime shifts can abruptly affect hydrological, climatic and terrestrial systems, leading to degraded ecosystems and impoverished societies. Researchers in the UK analysed empirical data from terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments and show positive sub-linear empirical relationships between the size and shift duration of systems. Each additional unit area of an ecosystem provides an increasingly smaller unit of time taken for that system to collapse, meaning that large systems tend to shift more slowly than small systems but disproportionately faster. They substantiated these findings with five computational models that reveal the importance of system structure in […]
Lights, camera, action… the super-fast world of droplet dynamics
Eurekalert February 25, 2020 The chemistry behind emerging 3D-printing technologies involves having chemicals deposited onto a surface in a highly specific way. But how to make that happen in the printing process is poorly understood. Researchers in the UK used two synchronised cameras to see what was happening both on the surface and inside the droplets and to make a better assessment of mixing, whether they have mixed or has one droplet just passed over the other. The research provides understanding of the way chemicals react when they are deposited by a 3D printer which will lead to significant advances […]
Growing crystals to generate random numbers
Phys.org February 19, 2020 The process of crystallization is random due to many factors that come into play as chemicals in a liquid solution evolve from a disordered state to one that is very organized. Researchers in the UK created a crystallization array and attached a reagent dispenser put different chemicals into the cups. A camera took a picture of each of the cups as crystal formation began. Each of the pictures was converted to a zero or a one based on nothing but the geography of the crystal. The zeros and ones were then strung together to form a […]
Lasers and terahertz waves combined in camera that sees ‘unseen’ detail
Science Daily February 18, 2020 The core challenge in THz cameras is not about collecting an image, but preserving the objects spectral fingerprint that can be easily corrupted by the technique. Researchers in the UK used a single-pixel camera to image sample objects with patterns of THz light. The prototype they built can detect how the object alters different patterns of THz light. By combining this information with the shape of each original pattern the camera reveals the image of an object as well as its chemical composition. The camera creates THz electromagnetic waves very close to the sample, similar […]
Reasons why megaprojects fail
Science Daily February 14, 2020 Megaprojects are the delivery model used to produce large-scale, complex, and one-off capital investments in a variety of public and private sectors. With a total capital cost of US$1 billion or more, megaprojects are extremely risky ventures, notoriously difficult to manage, and often fail to achieve their original objectives. Researchers in the UK reviewed and analyzed 6,007 titles and abstracts and 86 full papers, identifying a total of 18 causes and 54 cures to address poor megaproject performance. They suggest five avenues for future research that should consider examining megaprojects as large-scale, inter-organizational production systems: […]
Predicting Contagion Speed
American Physical Society February 12, 2020 To effectively monitor, design, or intervene in epidemic-like processes, there is a need to predict the speed of a particular contagion in a particular network, and to distinguish between nodes that are more likely to become infected sooner or later during an outbreak. Researchers in the UK studied global transport and communication networks using a message-passing approach to derive simple and effective predictions that are validated against epidemic simulations on a variety of real-world networks with good agreement. In addition to individualized predictions for different nodes, they found an overall sudden transition from low […]