Water is an abundant and essential compound, found everywhere on earth. Yet despite its familiarity and simple structure, water displays many unusual physical properties. For more than a century, scientists have turned their attention to the study of water, attempting to better interpret its structure. An international team of researchers, led by a scholar from Hiroshima University, has developed a procedure allowing them to reproduce the double peak feature of x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) spectra in liquid water. The study…

In order to detect water in the polar regions of the Moon, the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) has developed a robust laser in the LUVMI-X project. Used in the project partners’ measuring instrument, the system has already been successfully tested on regolith samples. The probability of finding volatiles such as water on the moon is highest in the Polar Regions, as they are frozen. These substances can be detected, for example, using the “laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy” (LIBS) method. To…

A new method for broadband THz–fingerprint Raman spectroscopy at an ultrafast spectral rate enables synchronous measurement of two distinct types of vibrational signals, for dual-region sensitivity. Raman spectroscopy offers a powerful approach to chemical measurement. By directly probing molecular vibrations, it obtains chemical specificity without the need for chemical labels. Thanks to these virtues, it has become an indispensable tool in a diverse range of fields, including materials science, biology, pharmaceuticals, and food science. Broadband Raman vibrational spectra are commonly…

Tightening a string, e.g. when tuning a guitar, makes it vibrate faster. But when strings are nano-sized, increased tension also reduces, or ‘dilutes’, the loss of the string’s vibrational modes. This effect, known as ‘dissipation dilution’, has been exploited to develop mechanical devices for quantum technologies, where engineered, tensioned nanostrings with a thickness of just a few tens of atomic layers oscillate more than ten billion times after being plucked just once. The equivalent on a guitar would be a…

While voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant may be a useful part of everyday life, they are coming under fire from data protection and consumer advocates. The virtual assistants are alleged to collect user data and transfer it to clouds, where it can be transcribed and analyzed by third parties. Now, researchers from the Fraunhofer FIT are putting the issue under the microscope: In a living lab study involving 33 households, they are investigating how much voice assistants…

Concrete’s properties as a material have made it an essential part of today’s construction methods. Alongside its many advantages, however, this universal favorite has its share of drawbacks – the most prominent being that its heterogeneous nature makes it difficult to dimension components and structures on the basis of simulations. Cracks induced by bending tests have provided some insights into component behavior. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer ITWM are developing analysis software designed for computed tomography, with the aim of…

Efficiency rates for production machinery frequently fall far below what technology could achieve. The common reason is experienced employees are not always available when a failure occurs while other employees lack the experience to solve the actual cause. That is where MADDOX comes in. A smart and self-learning assistance system that uses machine learning methods to analyze machine and process data. Via pattern recognition it also searches for similarities in failures and downtimes that occurred in the past. The system…

Fraunhofer IZM develops integration techniques for cryo-electronics. Quantum technology using superconductors are no longer a vision for the far-off future, but some of the hottest topics in current research. One major challenge remains: The electronic structures used to connect with the quantum parts of the quantum computers, such as qubits on chips, are often far bigger than the qubits themselves. Researchers at Fraunhofer IZM have innovated a process that fits twice as many connectors on the same surface than conventional…

Using adaptive mesh refinement, supercomputer simulation narrows axion mass range. Physicists searching — unsuccessfully — for today’s most favored candidate for dark matter, the axion, have been looking in the wrong place, according to a new supercomputer simulation of how axions were produced shortly after the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. Using new calculational techniques and one of the world’s largest computers, Benjamin Safdi, assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley; Malte Buschmann, a postdoctoral research…

Graphene multiplexed sensor works quicker, faster, and cheaper than previous opioid wastewater monitoring methods. The unique properties of the atom-thick sheet of carbon, known as graphene, enabled a new penny-sized, multiplexed bio-sensor that’s the first to detect opioid byproducts in wastewater, a team of researchers from Boston College, Boston University, and Giner Labs report in the latest online edition of the journal ACS Nano. The novel device is the first to use graphene-based field effect transistors to detect four different…

… paving the way for advances in optical computing. The work is a significant step toward realizing a new generation of ultra-compact, low-energy-use computers capable of complex mathematical computation. Computers are an indispensable part of our daily lives, and the need for ones that can work faster, solve complex problems more efficiently, and leave smaller environmental footprints by minimizing the required energy for computation is increasingly urgent. Recent progress in photonics has shown that it’s possible to achieve more efficient…

Transfer project strengthens robot autonomy and teamwork with humans. Autonomous mobile robots that work safely and intuitively with humans are not only an important building block of Industry 4.0. In future space missions, they are expected to support infrastructure construction on foreign planets. In the recently completed transfer project TransFIT, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the University of Bremen and Siemens AG developed the robotic skills required for the autonomous and collaborative execution of complex assembly work….

An international team of astronomers including those from the University of Freiburg and Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS), Germany, found that the axis of rotation of a black hole in a binary system is tilted more than 40 degrees relative to the axis of the stellar orbit. The finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation. The study has been published in “Science”. Astronomers made the first reliable measurement of a large difference between the axis of rotation…

Researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas and Oklahoma State University have developed an innovative terahertz imager microchip that can enable devices to detect and create images through obstacles that include fog, smoke, dust and snow. The team is working on a device for industrial applications that require imaging up to 20 meters away. The technology could also be adapted for use in cars to help drivers or autonomous vehicle systems navigate through hazardous conditions that reduce visibility. On…

Würzburg researchers have highlighted and quantified a three-fold coupling between exciton, photon, and phonon in a microcavity with embedded two-dimensional materials. Atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials can provide highly interesting excitonic properties, which render them an attractive platform to explore polaritonic physics. In the literature, a variety of inorganic exciton-polariton systems have been studied experimentally and described theoretically using the broadly accepted model of two coupled oscillators, where only the coupling between excitons and cavity photons is considered. Now, Donghai…

Autonomous vehicles are not only a major challenge in road traffic. Solutions for highly automated, fully automated and autonomous ships are also being developed for the maritime world. But how can autonomous ships be integrated into conventional maritime traffic? To avoid accidents, shipping traffic in coastal areas with very high traffic density is regulated by traffic control centers on shore. What support can science offer operators in their efforts to monitor mixed shipping traffic in the future? These are the…