01. ‘Living’ ceramics utilize bacteria for gas sensing and carbon capture 02. Longer records bring climate change’s impact on atmospheric circulation to light 03. New superionic conducting electrolyte could enhance stability of all-solid-state lithium metal batteries 04. A new way of thinking about skyrmion motion could lead to more robust electronics 05. Solar geoengineering could save 400,000 lives a year 06. Wearable energy harvester can be attached to the skin or clothes 07. Advancing a trustworthy quantum era: A novel approach to quantum protocol verification 08. Machine learning speeds up prediction of materials’ spectral properties 09. Colliding top quarks reveal […]
Advancing a trustworthy quantum era: A novel approach to quantum protocol verification
Phys.org December 19, 2024 It is crucial to verify quantum protocols before they can be trusted in safety and security-critical applications. Researchers in Japan proposed Basic Dynamic Quantum Logic (BDQL) to formalize and verify sequential models of quantum protocols with a support tool developed in Maude. As BDQL does not support concurrency in its formalization they introduced Concurrent Dynamic Quantum Logic (CDQL) to formalize and verify concurrent models of quantum protocols. They extended the syntax of BDQL to CDQL and made a transformation from CDQL to BDQL without interrupting the semantics of BDQL. They made new support tools in Maude […]
Colliding top quarks reveal hidden quantum ‘magic’
Phys.org December 19, 2024 For quantum computers the property called “magic” is critical. An international team of researchers (UK, Australia) considered the property of magic, which distinguished the quantum states leading to a genuine computational advantage over classical states when used in algorithms. They examined top-antitop pair production at the LHC produced magic tops, where the amount of magic varied with the kinematics of the final state. They compared results for individual partonic channels and at proton level. They showed that averaging over final states typically increased magic which contrasted with entanglement measures, such as the concurrence, which typically decreased. […]
Decoding atmospheric effects of gravity waves with high-res climate simulations
Phys.org December 23, 2024 To understand the impact of mesoscale variability, including gravity waves (GWs), on atmospheric circulation, a team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) extracted data from four months of an integrated data at 1 km resolution (XNR1K) using the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) model. They computed zonal and meridional flux of vertical momentum from ~1.5 petabytes of data. The fluxes were validated using ERA5 reanalysis, both during the first week after initialization and over the boreal winter period from November 2018 to February 2019. The agreement between reanalysis and IFS demonstrated its […]
‘Living’ ceramics utilize bacteria for gas sensing and carbon capture
Phys.org December 20, 2024 Although porous structures should favor colonization by microorganisms, they have not yet been exploited as abiotic scaffolds for the development of living materials. Researchers in Switzerland developed porous ceramics that are colonized by bacteria to form an engineered living material with self-regulated and genetically programmable carbon capture and gas-sensing functionalities. The carbon capture capability was achieved using wild-type photosynthetic cyanobacteria, whereas the gas-sensing function was generated utilizing genetically engineered E. coli. Hierarchical porous clay was used as a ceramic scaffold and evaluated in terms of bacterial growth, water uptake, and mechanical properties. Using state-of-the-art chemical analysis […]
Longer records bring climate change’s impact on atmospheric circulation to light
Phys.org December 23, 2024 The effects of climate change on atmospheric circulation are more complex because the atmosphere is noisy and chaotic and thermodynamic changes can generate effects that make circulation changes difficult to decipher. According to an international team of researchers (USA – University of Chicago, NOAA, Boulder CO, University of Virginia, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Israel, Finland) the circulation signals are an opportunity for improving our understanding of dynamical mechanisms, testing our theories and reducing uncertainties. The signals have also presented puzzles that represent an opportunity for better understanding the circulation response to climate change, its contribution to climate […]
Machine learning speeds up prediction of materials’ spectral properties
Phys.org December 23, 2024 Koopmans spectral functionals enable the prediction of spectral properties with state-of-the-art accuracy which relies on capturing the effects of electronic screening through scalar, orbital-dependent parameters. The parameters must be computed for every calculation, making Koopmans spectral functionals more expensive. Researchers in Switzerland developed a machine-learning model that can predict these screening parameters directly from orbital densities calculated at the density-functional theory (DFT) level. In two cases they showed that using the screening parameters predicted by this mode led to orbital energies that differ by less than 20 meV on average. This approach substantially reduced the run time […]
New superionic conducting electrolyte could enhance stability of all-solid-state lithium metal batteries
Phys.org December 22, 2024 An international team of researchers (Canada, USA – University of Maryland, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) reported a superionic conducting, lithium-compatible and air-stable vacancy-rich β-Li3N SSE. It showed high ionic conductivity and surpassed almost all the nitride-based SSEs, had good air stability. They demonstrated their stable cycling performance with high-capacity retentions over 5,000 cycles. The lithium metal batteries successfully accomplished mild rapid charge and discharge rates up to 5.0 C, retaining 60.47% of the capacity… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
A new way of thinking about skyrmion motion could lead to more robust electronics
Phys.org December 19, 2024 When the skyrmion lattice (SkL) acquires a drift velocity under conduction electron flow, an emergent electric field is also generated. The resulting emergent electrodynamics dictate the magnitude of the topological Hall effect (THE) by the relative motion of SkL and conduction electrons. Researchers in Japan reported the emergent electrodynamics induced by SkL motion in Gd2PdSi3, facilitated by its giant THE. They observed the dynamic transition of the SkL motion from the pinned to creep regime and finally to the flow regime, in which the THE was totally suppressed. According to the researchers the Galilean relativity required […]
Scientists observe ‘negative time’ in quantum experiments
Phys.org December 21, 2024 When a pulse of light traverses a material, it incurs group delay. Should the group delay experienced by photons be attributed to the time they spend as atomic excitations? However reasonable this connection may seem, it appears problematic when the frequency of the light is close to the atomic resonance, as the group delay becomes negative in this regime. An international team of researchers (Canada, Australia) used the cross-Kerr effect to probe the degree of atomic excitation caused by a resonant transmitted photon, by measuring the phase shift on a separate beam that was weak and […]