– the elusive glow between distant galaxies. An international team of astronomers have turned a new technique onto a group of galaxies and the faint light between them – known as ‘intra-group light’ – to characterise the stars that dwell there. Lead author of the study published in MNRAS, Dr Cristina Martínez-Lombilla from the School of Physics at UNSW Science, said “We know almost nothing about intra-group light. “The brightest parts of the intra-group light are ~50 times fainter than…

The JWST just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. The telescope’s array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a “hot Saturn” — a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away — known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet’s atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and…

Test link for quantum communication explores highly secure communication. As the crow flies, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF is 1.7 kilometers away from the Stadtwerke Jena (engl.: public utilities Jena). Over this distance, the institute is using a test link to research the exchange of quantum keys via free beams, i. e. through the air. With the help of this technology, our communication should become highly secure in the future. During the “Lange Nacht der…

Physicists at the University of Basel have experimentally demonstrated for the first time that there is a negative correlation between the two spins of an entangled pair of electrons from a superconductor. For their study, the researchers used spin filters made of nanomagnets and quantum dots, as they report in the scientific journal Nature. The entanglement between two particles is among those phenomena in quantum physics that are hard to reconcile with everyday experiences. If entangled, certain properties of the…

Invented in 1970 by Corning Incorporated, low-loss optical fiber became the best means to efficiently transport information from one place to another over long distances without loss of information. The most common way of data transmission nowadays is through conventional optical fibers – one single core channel transmits the information. However, with the exponential increase of data generation, these systems are reaching information-carrying capacity limits. Thus, research now focuses on finding new ways to utilize the full potential of fibers…

An international group of scientists including astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy presents new observations of the first quasar ever identified. Its name is 3C273 and it is located at a distance of approx. 1.9 Billion light years in the Virgo constellation. The new high-resolution radio images trace the jet down to the jet formation region and show how the width of the jet varies with distance from the central black hole. Active supermassive black holes emit…

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) has developed NNCodec, a new software that allows compressing neural networks to a fraction of their size without loss of accuracy. For non-commercial use only, NNCodec is now available as a free download via the software development platform GitHub. NNCodec specifically addresses research groups and development teams in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as it provides a powerful and standard-compliant solution. Artificial Intelligence (AI), as it provides a powerful and standard-compliant solution. NNCodec…

… of deep-ultraviolet laser diode at room temperature. A research group led by 2014 Nobel laureate Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University’s Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability (IMaSS) in central Japan, in collaboration with Asahi Kasei Corporation, has successfully conducted the world’s first room-temperature continuous-wave lasing of a deep-ultraviolet laser diode (wavelengths down to UV-C region). These results, published in Applied Physics Letters, represent a step toward the widespread use of a technology with the potential for a wide…

Researchers at The University of Queensland have used satellites with radar imaging sensors to see through clouds and map flooding and say the technique could provide faster, more detailed information to keep communities safe. Professor Noam Levin from UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences said the project combined images from optical satellites with information from imaging radar satellites. “Monitoring floods in towns and cities is challenging, with flood waters often rising and then receding in a few days,” Professor Levin said. “While…

A multi-institution research team has developed an optical chip that can train machine learning hardware.  THE SITUATION Machine learning applications skyrocketed to $165B annually, according to a recent report from McKinsey. But, before a machine can perform intelligence tasks such as recognizing the details of an image, it must be trained. Training of modern-day artificial intelligence (AI) systems like Tesla’s autopilot costs several million dollars in electric power consumption and requires supercomputer-like infrastructure. This surging AI “appetite” leaves an ever-widening…

… show potential for making larger structures. Researchers make progress toward groups of robots that could build almost anything, including buildings, vehicles, and even bigger robots. Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such…

Doubling the quantum information space of commercial technologies, this new chip is better suited for real-world application. Researchers at Penn Engineering have created a chip that outstrips the security and robustness of existing quantum communications hardware. Their technology communicates in “qudits,” doubling the quantum information space of any previous on-chip laser. Liang Feng, Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Electrical Systems and Engineering (ESE), along with MSE postdoctoral fellow Zhifeng Zhang and ESE Ph.D. student Haoqi Zhao,…

A team of German and Spanish researchers headed by Prof. Hubert Krenner from the Institute of Physics at Münster University has succeeded in using a soundwave to switch individual photons on a chip back and forth between two outputs at gigahertz frequencies. A team of German and Spanish researchers from Valencia, Münster, Augsburg, Berlin and Munich have succeeded in controlling individual light quanta to an extremely high degree of precision. In the “Nature Communications” journal, the researchers report how, by…

A research team from Jena (Germany) and Turin (Italy) has reconstructed the origin of an unusual gravitational wave signal. As the researchers write in the current issue of the scientific journal “Nature Astronomy”, the signal GW190521 may result from the merger of two massive black holes that captured each other in their gravitational field and then collided while spinning around each other in a rapid, eccentric motion (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01813-w). When black holes collide in the universe, the clash shakes up…

The fine structure constant is one of the most important natural constants of all. At TU Wien, a remarkable way of measuring it has been found – it shows up as a rotation angle. One over 137 – this is one of the most important numbers in physics. It is the approximate value of the so-called fine structure constant – a physical quantity that is of outstanding importance in atomic and particle physics. There are many ways to measure the…

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has recently developed a novel integration scheme for efficient coupling between III-V compound semiconductor devices and silicon components on silicon photonics (Si-photonics) platform by selective direct epitaxy, unlocking the potential of integrating energy-efficient photonics with cost-effective electronics, as well as enabling the next generation telecommunications with low cost, high speed and large capacity. Over the past few years, data traffic has been growing exponentially driven by various applications and…