How Gamma Rays Track the Velocity of the Galactic Microquasar SS 433’s Jets and Uncover Highly Efficient Particle Acceleration. The science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke selected his own seven wonders of the world in a BBC television series in 1997. The only astronomical object he included was SS 433. It had attracted attention already in the late 1970s due to its X-ray emission and was later discovered to be at the center of a gas nebula that is dubbed…

Application of dData assimilation applied to adaptive predictive control. Fusion energy is being developed as a solution to global energy problems. In particular, the magnetic confinement method, in which ultra-high temperature plasma is confined by a magnetic field, is the most advanced and is considered to be the most promising method for fusion reactors. By this method, the plasma is confined in the reactor in a high-temperature, high-density state by a magnetic field, and the energy released by the fusion…

Scientific article “Sub-cycle multidimensional spectroscopy of strongly correlated materials” published in Nature Photonics. An international team of researchers from the European XFEL together with colleagues from the Max-Born Institute in Berlin, Universities of Berlin and Hamburg, The University of Tokyo, the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the Dutch Radboud University, Imperial College London, and Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging, have presented new ideas for ultrafast multi-dimensional spectroscopy of strongly correlated solids. This work has now…

Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden, and just as you would use a flashlight to see in the dark, scientists can use light to uncover these properties. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used an advanced optical technique to learn more about a quantum material called Ta2NiSe5 (TNS). Their work appears in Nature Materials. Materials can be perturbed through different external stimuli, often with changes in temperature or pressure; however, because light is the fastest thing in…

The evolution of the iCub3 avatar system. The fully immersive iCub3 avatar system has been developed by researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia addressing challenges posed by real-world scenario. A paper published in Science Robotics explains the different stages of its development. Over the past four years, the research team at the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence (AMI) lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in Genova (Italy) has developed advanced avatar technologies, known as the…

Finding offers new starting points for research into photonic quantum information systems. An international team of researchers from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany) and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (United Kingdom) has disproved a previously held assumption about the impact of multiphoton components in interference effects of thermal fields (e.g. sunlight) and parametric single photons (generated in non-linear crystals). “We experimentally proved that the interference effect between thermal light and parametric single photons also leads to quantum interference with the…

Discovery of a material with a large nonreciprocal absorption of light that differs by a factor of two or more when the direction of light propagation is reversed. At the heart of global internet connectivity, optical communications form an indispensable foundation.  Key to this foundation are optical isolators, created by combining multiple components. The result is a complex structure that transmits light in only one direction, to prevent damage to lasers and minimize noise by avoiding the reversal of light….

…is slippery slope to energy-efficient technology. Scientists led by the University of Leicester have made an insight into superlubricity, where surfaces experience extremely low levels of friction. While many of us are treading carefully to avoid a slip in the frosty weather, scientists led by the University of Leicester have been investigating how to make surfaces even slippier! They have solved a conundrum in the principles of superlubricity – a state in which two surfaces experience little to almost vanishing…

Quantum magnetometers are able to detect and visualize the tiniest damage in ferromagnetic materials. In aerospace technology or the automotive industry, they can help to significantly increase the resilience and safety of systems and materials. This conclusion was reached by researchers from the recently completed Fraunhofer lighthouse project QMag. They also investigated the use of quantum magnetometers in biomedicine, flow measurement and chip production. Structural defects such as cracks, precipitations or other irregularities in metallic materials lead to local changes…

Security of 5G/6G backbone components and networks. The security of communication networks is becoming more and more important with increasing digitalization. The “RealSec5G” project aims at testing the requirements for data security in communication devices for 5G/6G infrastructures in a deterministic time-sensitive network (TSN). For this purpose, the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS is designing a TSN-MACsec function block that will be tested as part of a demonstrator. The final implementation and performance analysis will be done in cooperation…

In quantum computing, the question as to what physical system, and which degrees of freedom within that system, may be used to encode quantum bits of information – qubits, in short – is at the heart of many research projects carried out in physics and engineering laboratories. Superconducting qubits, spin qubits, and qubits encoded in the motion of trapped ions are already recognised widely as prime candidates for future practical applications of quantum computers; other systems need to be better…

When a high-energy photon strikes a proton, secondary particles diverge in a way that indicates that the inside of the proton is maximally entangled. An international team of physicists with the participation of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow has just demonstrated that maximum entanglement is present in the proton even in those cases where pomerons are involved in the collisions. Eighteen months ago, it was shown that different parts of the interior…

Scientists outline new processes for leveraging hafnia’s ferroelectric features with the aim of enhancing high-performance computing. Scientists and engineers have been pushing for the past decade to leverage an elusive ferroelectric material called hafnium oxide, or hafnia, to usher in the next generation of computing memory. A team of researchers including the University of Rochester’s Sobhit Singh published a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study outlining progress toward making bulk ferroelectric and antiferroelectric hafnia available for use in…

Integral imaging (II) display is one of the most promising near-eye displays (NEDs) due to its compact volume, full parallax, convenient full-color display, and, more importantly, true-3D and more realistic depth perception from eliminating the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). However, II displays based on the conventional optical architecture, such as microlens arrays, are limited in resolution, field of view, depth of field, etc. As micro-displays have increasingly higher pixel densities, conventional optical architecture is inadequate in pixel-level light manipulation. Meta-optics has…

Astrophysicists at the University of Jena are analysing the latest observational data from the Gaia space telescope and not only finding hundreds of new companion stars of exoplanet host stars, but also showing how these influence planetary properties. People in ancient times knew five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which they considered to be “wandering stars”. It was only with the Copernican revolution in the 16th century, the Earth itself also became a planet, orbiting our planet host…

Quantum physicist Mickael Perrin uses graphene ribbons to build nanoscale power plants that turn waste heat from electrical equipment into electricity. A visit to the engineer with the invisible machines. When Mickael Perrin started out on his scientific career 12 years ago, he had no way of knowing he was conducting research in an area that would be attracting wide public interest only a few years later: quantum electronics. “At the time, physicists were just starting to talk about the…