By mimicking features of living systems, self-organising lasers could lead to new materials for sensing, computing, light sources and displays. While many artificial materials have advanced properties, they have a long way to go to combine the versatility and functionality of living materials that can adapt to their situation. For example, in the human body bone and muscle continuously reorganise their structure and composition to better sustain changing weight and level of activity. Now, researchers from Imperial College London and…

If simply breathing can spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others nearby, what about blowing into a tuba? Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used fluid mechanics to study the movement of aerosols generated by professional musicians. The latest research from the labs of Penn scientists Paulo Arratia and Douglas Jerolmack was an answer to “a call for help,” says Arratia. It was 2020, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, like so many cultural institutions, had suspended performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic….

The clear and periodic pattern of fast radio bursts may originate from a distant neutron star. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a strange and persistent radio signal from a far-off galaxy that appears to be flashing with surprising regularity. The signal is classified as a fast radio burst, or FRB — an intensely strong burst of radio waves of unknown astrophysical origin, that typically lasts for a few milliseconds at most. However, this new signal persists for up…

Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology. Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of over 150,000 silicon ‘T centre’ photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them. Quantum computing has enormous potential to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry,…

Columbia Engineers build a robot that learns to understand itself, rather than the world around it. As every athletic or fashion-conscious person knows, our body image is not always accurate or realistic, but it’s an important piece of information that determines how we function in the world. When you get dressed or play ball, your brain is constantly planning ahead so that you can move your body without bumping, tripping, or falling over. We humans acquire our body-model as infants,…

A team of researchers, led by Virginia Tech, has engineered a glove that mimics the arm of an octopus. This work was featured on the cover of Science Advances. A team of researchers led by Virginia Tech’s Michael Bartlett have developed an octopus-inspired glove capable of securely gripping objects underwater. Their research was selected for the July 13 cover of Science Advances. Humans aren’t naturally equipped to thrive in an underwater environment. We use tanks to breathe, neoprene suits to protect and warm our…

… help to compress light for nanophotonic applications. KAIST researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Phonon-polaritons are collective oscillations of ions in polar dielectrics coupled…

New COMAP radio survey will peer beneath the “tip of the iceberg” of galaxies to unveil a hidden era of star formation. Sometime around 400 million years after the birth of our universe, the first stars began to form. The universe’s so-called dark ages came to an end and a new light-filled era began. More and more galaxies began to take shape and served as factories for churning out new stars, a process that reached a peak about 4 billion…

Neutron stars have the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, and the only way to measure their surface magnetic field directly is to observe the cyclotron absorption lines in their X-ray energy spectra. The Insight-HXMT team has recently discovered a cyclotron absorption line with an energy of 146 keV in the neutron star X-ray binary Swift J0243.6+6124, corresponding to a surface magnetic field of more than 1.6 billion Tesla. After direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the universe…

Theoreticians at the MPSD have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin influences the emission of light on the ultrafast timescale. Their work has been published in npj computational materials. Electrons, present in all kind of matter, are charged particles and therefore they react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, these particles experience a force, called the Lorentz force, that drives them and induces some exquisite…

With their newly developed “nanoTIPTOE” technique, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in cooperation with Stanford University, have managed for the first time to record a helical light field on shortest time and length scales. It has been known since the end of the 19th century that light is an electromagnetic wave, whereby its frequency determines its color. With around one quadrillion oscillations per second, light oscillates so quickly that…

… using the organic electro-optic polymer for visible light. [Highlights] – Development of an optical modulator using the organic electro-optic polymer operated in visible light – Significantly shorter wavelength and higher efficiency (smaller size and lower voltage) than conventional optical modulators for near-infrared light – Application to next generation display devices such as stereoscopic displays and smart glasses [Abstract] The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) has successfully developed a highly efficient optical modulator…

In 2019 tidal disruption, much of star’s mass ended up in symmetrical cloud that hid black hole. In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or “spaghettified,” after approaching too close to a massive black hole. That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers…

Quantum memories are one of the building blocks of the future quantum internet. Without them, it would be rather impossible to transmit quantum information over long distances and expand into a real quantum network. These memories have the mission of receiving the quantum information encoded in a photon in the form of qubits, store it and then retrieve it. Quantum memories can be realized in different material systems, for example ensembles of cold atoms or doped crystals. In order to…

… in organic-inorganic hybrid lead halide perovskite with terahertz probes. Organic-inorganic hybrid metal halide perovskites (MHPs) have attracted tremendous attention for optoelectronic applications. For example, cost-effective solar cells, solid-state lighting, memristors, and ultrafast spin switches in spintronics have recently been designed using MHPs. Despite the promise of the material, many questions remain regarding the nature and mobility of charge carriers in MHPs, which require further understanding. Researchers from the University of shanghai for science and technology, in collaboration with Qingdao…

Researchers develop user-friendly software system to optimize biological systems. Machine learning is transforming all areas of biological science and industry, but is typically limited to a few users and scenarios. A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology led by Tobias Erb has developed METIS, a modular software system for optimizing biological systems. The research team demonstrates its usability and versatility with a variety of biological examples. Though engineering of biological systems is truly indispensable in…