Specialized reflective panels located on top of buildings and deployed widely across a city could significantly improve network coverage, shows a KAUST modeling study. Next-generation cellular networks (5G and beyond) will provide communication coverage to wider rural areas, while improving data exchange rates to meet rapidly rising demand. In urban areas in particular, obstacles in the form of buildings and other structures can impede wireless communication links, reducing mobile device signals and slowing data exchange. Research has shown that reconfigurable…

Removing one charged molecule from a one-dimensional array causes the others to alternately turn ‘on’ or ‘off,’ paving the way for information transfer in tiny circuits. Small electronic circuits power our everyday lives, from the tiny cameras in our phones to the microprocessors in our computers. To make those devices even smaller, scientists and engineers are designing circuitry components out of single molecules. Not only could miniaturized circuits offer the benefits of increased device density, speed, and energy efficiency —…

When you cool down liquid water, it crystallizes into ice. Consider a bucket filled with water, for example. When the water is liquid, the water molecules can be anywhere inside the bucket. In this sense, every point inside the bucket is equivalent. Once the water freezes, however, the water molecules occupy well-defined positions in space. Thus, not every point inside the bucket is equivalent anymore. Physicists refer to this phenomenon as spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here the translation symmetry in space…

Rice, MD Anderson team models complex that immune system uses to recognize viruses. “Position 4” didn’t seem important until researchers took a long look at a particular peptide. That part of the peptide drawn from a SARS-CoV virus turned out to have an unexpected but significant influence on how it stably binds with a receptor central to the immune system’s ability to attack diseased cells. In a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at…

Electron microscopes provide deep insight into the smallest details of matter and can reveal, for example, the atomic configuration of materials, the structure of proteins or the shape of virus particles. However, most materials in nature are not static and rather interact, move and reshape all the time. One of the most common phenomena is the interaction between light and matter, which is ubiquitous in plants as well as in optical components, solar cells, displays or lasers. These interactions –…

The XENON collaboration recently announced an unexpected signal. The collaboration emphasizes that some new, hitherto unrecognized background might be the cause. The signal could, however, equally well be the first indication of some “new physics” beyond the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. This prospect attracted theorists world-wide to suggest and analyze potential explanations in terms of some new physics. Theorists at MPIK who are close to the experiment also study extensions of the Standard Model with suitable parameters that…

In order for robots to be able to achieve more than simple automated machines in the future, they must not only have their own “brain”. Empa researchers postulate that artificial intelligence must be expanded to include the capabilities of a Physical Artificial Intelligence, PAI. This will redefine the field of robotics and the relationship between man and machine. Artificial intelligence is supposed to make machines perform at ever more amazing levels. A robot that can do little more than a…

The understanding of unconventional superconductivity is one of the most challenging and fascinating tasks of solid-state physics. Different classes of unconventional superconductors share that superconductivity emerges near a magnetic phase despite the underlying physics is different. Two of these unconventional materials are the heavy-fermion and the iron-based superconductors. Researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids applied large hydrostatic pressures to tiny single crystals of CeFeAsO, a non-superconducting parent compound to iron-based superconductors, using diamond anvil pressure…

The water electrolysis is an electrochemical way for production of hydrogen, which is considered as one of the future energy carrier molecules. Therefore, looking at numerous advantages of proton exchange membrane electrolysis compared to the classical alkaline variant, it’s efficiency and applicability on the large scale is of huge importance nowadays. However, the slow kinetics of the anode oxygen evolution reaction (OER) limits the overall electrolysis process and requires an active and stable electrocatalyst. Such need inspired the scientists of…

Researchers have developed a tiny device that paves the way for higher performance quantum computers and quantum communications, making them significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art. Bristol researchers have developed a tiny device that paves the way for higher performance quantum computers and quantum communications, making them significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art. Researchers from the University of Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs) and Université Côte d’Azur have made a new miniaturized light detector to measure quantum features…

Whether axions exist is still up for debate. If they do exist, two open questions in particle physics could be resolved: The puzzle of what dark matter is made of – and the question of why the strong interaction, one of the four known forces in the universe, has a particular characteristic. The international MADMAX collaboration, is developing a search engine for these previously purely hypothetical particles under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. The collaboration has…

In 1973, physicist and later Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson proposed a bizarre state of matter: the quantum spin liquid (QSL). Unlike the everyday liquids we know, the QSL actually has to do with magnetism – and magnetism has to do with spin. Disordered electron spin produces QSLs What makes a magnet? It was a long-lasting mystery, but today we finally know that magnetism arises from a peculiar property of sub-atomic particles, like electrons. That property is called “spin”, and…

EPFL engineers have developed a computer chip that combines two functions – logic operations and data storage – into a single architecture, paving the way to more efficient devices. It’s a major breakthrough in the field of electronics. Engineers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) have developed a next-generation circuit that allows for smaller, faster and more energy-efficient devices – which would have major benefits for artificial-intelligence systems. Their revolutionary technology is the first to use a…

Even if a black hole can be described with a mathematical model, it doesn’t mean it exists in reality. Some theoretical models are unstable: though they can be used to run mathematical calculations, from the point of view of physics they make no sense. A physicist from RUDN University developed an approach to finding such instability regions. The work was published in the Physics of the Dark Universe journal. The existence of black holes was first predicted by Einstein’s general…

Know when to unfold ’em ‘Unfolding’ techniques used to improve the accuracy of particle detector data can also improve the readout of quantum states from a quantum computer. Borrowing a page from high-energy physics and astronomy textbooks, a team of physicists and computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully adapted and applied a common error-reduction technique to the field of quantum computing. In the world of subatomic particles and giant particle…

Mapping the magnetic field for Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment As scientists await the highly anticipated initial results of the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, collaborating scientists from DOE‘s Argonne National Laboratory continue to employ and maintain the unique system that maps the magnetic field in the experiment with unprecedented precision. Argonne scientists upgraded the measurement system, which uses an advanced communication scheme and new magnetic field probes and electronics to map the field throughout…