Liquids are ubiquitous in Nature: from the water that we consume daily to superfluid helium which is a quantum liquid appearing at temperatures as low as only a few degrees above the absolute zero. A common feature of these vastly different liquids is being self-bound in free space in the form of droplets. Understanding from a microscopic perspective how a liquid is formed by adding particles one by one is a significant challenge. Recently, a new type of quantum droplets…

Wireless power transfers in the ocean For drones that can be stationed underwater for the adoption of ICT in mariculture. Associate professor Masaya Tamura, Kousuke Murai (who has completed the first term of his master’s program), and their research team from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology have successfully transferred power and data wirelessly through seawater by using a power transmitter/receiver with four layers of ultra-thin, flat electrodes. In the field of wireless…

Physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered how to locally add electrical charge to an atomically thin graphene device by layering flakes of another thin material, alpha-RuCl3, on top of it. A paper published in the journal Nano Letters describes the charge transfer process in detail. Gaining control of the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing. “In my field, where we study van der Waals heterostructures…

When two atomically thin layers of a material are stacked and twisted slightly on top of one another, they can develop radically different properties. They may become superconducting or even develop magnetic or electronic properties due to the interaction of their two layers. The challenge for scientists is to find out precisely what happens in these ultra-thin double layers – and how these changes can be induced and tuned. Now a research team from the United States and Germany has…

On April 15, 2020, a brief burst of high-energy light swept through the solar system, triggering instruments on several NASA and European spacecraft. Now, multiple international science teams conclude that the blast came from a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar located in a neighboring galaxy. This finding confirms long-held suspicions that some gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – cosmic eruptions detected in the sky almost daily – are in fact powerful flares from magnetars relatively close to home. “This has…

Scientists tame photon-magnon interaction. Working with theorists in the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, researchers in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have achieved a scientific control that is a first of its kind. They demonstrated a novel approach that allows real-time control of the interactions between microwave photons and magnons, potentially leading to advances in electronic devices and quantum signal processing. Microwave photons are elementary particles forming the electromagnetic waves that we use…

For the first time, physicists from the University of Innsbruck have entangled two quantum bits distributed over several quantum objects and successfully transmitted their quantum properties. This marks an important milestone in the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers. The researchers published their report in Nature. Even computers can miscalculate. Already small disturbances change stored information and corrupt results. That is why computers use methods to continuously correct such errors. In quantum computers, the vulnerability to errors can be reduced by…

Study shows improvements to chemical sensing chip that aims to quickly and accurately identify drugs and other trace chemicals. University at Buffalo researchers are reporting an advancement of a chemical sensing chip that could lead to handheld devices that detect trace chemicals — everything from illicit drugs to pollution — as quickly as a breathalyzer identifies alcohol. The chip, which also may have uses in food safety monitoring, anti-counterfeiting and other fields where trace chemicals are analyzed, is described in…

To perform calculations, quantum computers need qubits to act as elementary building blocks that process and store information. Now, physicists have produced a new type of qubit that can be switched from a stable idle mode to a fast calculation mode. The concept would also allow a large number of qubits to be combined into a powerful quantum computer, as researchers from the University of Basel and TU Eindhoven have reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Compared with conventional bits,…

A new era of mobile communication is about to begin: Transmitting a whole terabit of data, one thousand gigabits, per second. Dr. Ivan Ndip, specialist for antenna and high-frequency systems at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin speaks about current progress with 6G and its many possible applications. What does 6G stand for? Dr. Ndip: 6G is the sixth generation of mobile communication. With 5G, we had data rates of up to 20 gigabit per second…

Quantum entanglement is key for next-generation computing and communications technology, Aalto researchers can now produce it using temperature differences. A joint group of scientists from Finland, Russia, China and the USA have demonstrated that temperature difference can be used to entangle pairs of electrons in superconducting structures. The experimental discovery, published in Nature Communications, promises powerful applications in quantum devices, bringing us one step closer towards applications of the second quantum revolution. The team, led by Professor Pertti Hakonen from…

Chinese scientists have established the world’s first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 kilometers for users across the country. The team, led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported in Nature their latest advances towards the global, practical application of such a network for future communications. Unlike…

The exponential growth of data traffic in our digital age poses some real challenges on processing power. And with the advent of machine learning and AI in, for example, self-driving vehicles and speech recognition, the upward trend is set to continue. All this places a heavy burden on the ability of current computer processors to keep up with demand. Now, an international team of scientists has turned to light to tackle the problem. The researchers developed a new approach and…

They are not yet usable as building blocks – but the lanes melted with the laser are a first step towards 3D-printed buildings, landing points, and roads made of moon dust. In the MOONRISE project, the team of scientists from the Institute of Space Systems (IRAS) at the Technical University of Braunschweig and the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH) have succeeded in both melting regolith under lunar gravity and “printing” joint lanes. At the end of the two-year project funded…

All photo-electronic devices work on the basis that the materials inside them absorb, transmit and reflect light. Understanding the photo properties of a specific material at the atomic level not only helps to decide what material to choose for a given application but also opens up ways to control such properties on demand. In a new collaborative work, researchers from Italy, Germany and the United States show how ‘kicking’ the atoms in a CuGeO3 crystal with an infrared laser pulse…

They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner—so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years. The materials possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now used ultracold atoms to gain new insights into previously unknown quantum phenomena. They found out that…