… thought to be impossible. Associate professor Mazhar Ali and his research group at TU Delft have discovered one-way superconductivity without magnetic fields, something that was thought to be impossible ever since its discovery in 1911 – up till now. The discovery, published in Nature, makes use of 2D quantum materials and paves the way towards superconducting computing. Superconductors can make electronics hundreds of times faster, all with zero energy loss. Ali: “If the 20th century was the century of…

Using new analyses, scientists have just found the last two of the five informational units of DNA and RNA that had yet to be discovered in samples from meteorites. While it is unlikely that DNA could be formed in a meteorite, this discovery demonstrates that these genetic parts are available for delivery and could have contributed to the development of the instructional molecules on early Earth. The discovery, by an international team with NASA researchers, gives more evidence that chemical…

Thanks to today’s light, flexible solar panels, photovoltaics may be more practical for long stays. The high efficiency, light weight and flexibility of the latest solar cell technology means photovoltaics could provide all the power needed for an extended mission to Mars, or even a permanent settlement there, according to a new analysis by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Most scientists and engineers who’ve thought about the logistics of living on the surface of the Red Planet have…

Researchers at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin have developed a nano-repeater that amplifies light in only one direction. Today, optical fibers are the backbone of our information society. However, in order to transmit data over long distances using light in fiber optic networks, the light must be amplified regularly to compensate for the losses that occur. So-called repeaters are used for this purpose. One important repeater design is based on amplifying light using the laser effect. For this purpose, atoms within…

An international team of researchers examined data for 25 exoplanets and found some links among the properties of the atmospheres, including the thermal profiles and chemical abundances in them. This marks the first time exoplanet atmospheres have been studied as populations, rather than individually. These findings will help establish a generalized theory of planet formation which will improve our understanding of all planets, including the Earth. Today there are more than 3000 confirmed exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the…

Ultrasound images are a powerful biological and biomedical sciences tool. An advancement in this technique is photoacoustic imaging (PAI). It is where the skin or tissue absorbs pulses of laser light. The thermoelastic expansion of the skin or tissue emits sound, which is processed by the machinery to develop high-resolution images. Recent developments have theorized the existence of vibrational PAI, which could penetrate further into the skin. In a new paper published in eLight, a team of scientists led by…

Researchers have developed a technique that enables a robot to learn a new pick-and-place task with only a handful of human demonstrations. With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it how to grasp…

INRS researchers and international partners have succeeded in looking at spin inside rare earth materials, using a tabletop ultrafast soft-X-ray microscope, for the first time. Sharing real-time information requires complex networks of systems. A promising approach for speeding up data storage devices consists of switching the magnetization, or the electrons’ spin, of magnetic materials with ultra-short femtosecond laser pulses. But, how the spin evolves in the nanoworld on extremely short time scales, in one millionth of one billionth of a…

… can help in monitoring environment and diagnosing cancer. When a high-power ultrashort pulse of light interacts with a material such as a glass optical fibre, a range of highly nonlinear interactions take place that cause complex changes in both the temporal and spectral properties of the injected light. When taken to the extreme, such interactions can lead to the generation of a rainbow laser of light commonly referred to as a supercontinuum light source. Since its first demonstration in…

Stanford University researchers have developed a key experimental device for future quantum physics-based technologies that borrows a page from current, everyday mechanical devices. Reliable, compact, durable, and efficient, acoustic devices harness mechanical motion to perform useful tasks. A prime example of such a device is the mechanical oscillator. When displaced by a force – like sound, for instance – components of the device begin moving back-and-forth about their original position. Creating this periodic motion is a handy way to keep…

New technique enables precise measurement of electrostatic properties of materials. Physicists at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated the use of a hydrogen molecule as a quantum sensor in a terahertz laser-equipped scanning tunneling microscope, a technique that can measure the chemical properties of materials at unprecedented time and spatial resolutions. This new technique can also be applied to analysis of two-dimensional materials which have the potential to play a role in advanced energy systems, electronics and quantum computers….

Imaging method measures particle size and position with nanometer precision. Researchers have developed a new measurement and imaging approach that can resolve nanostructures smaller than the diffraction limit of light without requiring any dyes or labels. The work represents an important advance toward a new and powerful microscopy method that could one day be used to see the fine features of complex samples beyond what is possible with conventional microscopes and techniques. The new method, described in Optica, Optica Publishing…

Oxford University researchers have developed a sensor made of sapphire fibre that can tolerate extreme temperatures, with the potential to enable significant improvements in efficiency and emission reduction in aerospace and power generation. The work, published in the journal Optics Express, uses a sapphire optical fibre – a thread of industrially grown sapphire less than half a millimetre thick – which can withstand temperatures over 2000°C. When light is injected onto one end of the sapphire fibre, some is reflected…

… solve the enigma of ultrashort soliton molecules. Stable packets of light waves – called optical solitons – are emitted in ultrashort-pulse lasers as a chain of light flashes. These solitons often combine into pairs with very short temporal separation. Introducing atomic vibrations in the terahertz range, researchers at the Universities of Bayreuth and Wrocław have now solved the puzzle of how these temporal links are formed. They report on their discovery in Nature Communications. The dynamics of the coupled…

A hand-held laser pointer produces no noticeable recoil forces when it is “fired” – even though it emits a directed stream of light particles. The reason for this is its very large mass compared to the very small recoil impulses that the light particles cause when leaving the laser pointer. However, it has long been clear that optical recoil forces can indeed have a very large effect on correspondingly small particles. For example, the tails of comets point away from…

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of stellar explosion that could be commonplace in the universe and may change our understanding of how eruptions in stars occur. A micronova is a thermonuclear blast that lasts for just a few hours making them extremely difficult to observe. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars and can each rapidly burn through a huge amount of stellar material equivalent to around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza. An international team of…