Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of December 27, 2024
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 hidden quantum ‘magic’
10. Decoding atmospheric effects of gravity waves with high-res climate simulations
And others
Scientists observe ‘negative time’ in quantum experiments
Spintronics memory innovation: A new perpendicular magnetized film
Stretchable, flexible, recyclable: 3D printing method creates fantastic plastic
Stretchable technology: Revolutionizing next-generation electronics through freeform deformation
Tiny, wireless antennas use light to monitor cellular communication
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 making rewriting strategy and verification process faster. Several quantum communication protocols were successfully formalized and verified in BDQL/CDQL, demonstrating the effectiveness of their automated approach and tool in verifying quantum protocols… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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. Some entanglement measures have a nonzero threshold for entanglement, but there was no such nonzero threshold for magic. According to the researchers their results create new links between quantum information and particle physics literature, providing practical insights for further study… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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 capability to generate reliable flux distributions and capture mesoscale dynamic variability in the atmosphere. According to the researchers the dataset could be valuable in advancing our understanding of GW-planetary wave interactions, GW evolution around atmospheric extremes, and as high-quality training data for machine learning simulation of GWs… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
‘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 techniques, the ability of living porous ceramics were demonstrated to capture CO2 directly from the air and to metabolically turn minute amounts of toxic gas into a benign scent detectable by humans… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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 extremes, interactions with moisture, and connection to thermodynamic discrepancies. The next decade is likely to be a golden age for dynamics with many advances possible… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
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 enabling the application of Koopmans spectral functionals to classes of problems that would have been prohibitively expensive. According to the researchers, their work demonstrated that measuring violations of piecewise linearity could be done efficiently by combining frozen-orbital approximations and machine learning… read more.
Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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 for the total cancellation of the THE may be generically recovered in the flow regime, even in complex multiband systems. THE voltages were large enough to enable real-time measurement of the SkL velocity–current profile, which showed the inertial-like motion of the SkL in the creep regime, appearing as the current hysteresis of the skyrmion velocity….read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE  [An Author Correction to this article was published on 29 November 2024]
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 off-resonant. Over a range of pulse durations and optical depths their results were consistent with the recent theoretical prediction that the mean atomic excitation time caused by a transmitted photon equals the group delay experienced by the light. They measured mean atomic excitation times for the most narrowband pulse for the most broadband pulse. According to the researchers their results suggest that negative values taken by times such as the group delay have more physical significance than has generally been appreciated… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ [not peer reviewed]