Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope ready to receive optical components. The NSF-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory has reached a major construction milestone with the completion of the telescope structure, known as the Telescope Mount Assembly. This designation means that the telescope, named the Simonyi Survey Telescope, is on track to receive the observatory’s massive 8.4-meter mirror, 3200-megapixel LSST Camera (the largest digital camera ever constructed for astronomy, funded by the Department of Energy and built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), and other precision optical…

Short, externally occulted Space Weather Solar Coronagraph features novel 1.5-stage occultation scheme. NASA has selected Southwest Research Institute for a Phase A study to develop SwRI’s Space Weather Solar Coronagraph (SwSCOR) on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s Space Weather Next Program is charged with providing critical data for its space weather prediction center. SwRI is one of five organizations developing a definition-phase study to produce the next-generation NOAA L1 Series COR instrument to detect and…

Modeled behavior consistent with results from helical magnet experiments. Physicists have discovered “stacked pancakes of liquid magnetism” that may account for the strange electronic behavior of some layered helical magnets. The materials in the study are magnetic at cold temperatures and become nonmagnetic as they thaw. Experimental physicist Makariy Tanatar of Ames National Laboratory at Iowa State University noticed perplexing electronic behavior in layered helimagnetic crystals and brought the mystery to the attention of Rice theoretical physicist Andriy Nevidomskyy, who…

The precision of obtaining abundant light-matter-interact information with a snapshot measurement makes optical spectroscopy indispensable for modern industries and scientific research. The miniaturization of traditionally bulky spectrometers has been strongly motivated by the vast applications, including bio/medical sensing, material analysis, optical communication, and light source characterization. Researchers have been engineering spectrometers for lower cost, higher flexibilities, smaller size, better stabilities, and performances for quite some time. However, an inherent trade-off between the above aspects constrains this long-term theme of miniaturization…

Quantum dots in semiconductors such as silicon or gallium arsenide have long been considered hot candidates for hosting quantum bits in future quantum processors. Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University have now shown that bilayer graphene has even more to offer here than other materials. The double quantum dots they have created are characterized by a nearly perfect electron-hole-symmetry that allows a robust read-out mechanism – one of the necessary criteria for quantum computing. The results were published…

A perfect interface between free-space and integrated optical systems. New class of integrated nanophotonic devices–a world record in simultaneous control of all four optical degrees of freedom–can convert light initially confined in an optical waveguide to an arbitrary optical pattern in free space. Researchers at Columbia Engineering have developed a new class of integrated photonic devices–“leaky-wave metasurfaces”–that can convert light initially confined in an optical waveguide to an arbitrary optical pattern in free space. These devices are the first to…

The race is on to provide high speed satellite internet to the Earth’s most remote areas. New tech companies such as Starlink, One Web, and Amazon’s Kuiper are competing with traditional, established “satcomm” companies such as Thuraya and Inmarsat to provide global high speed, low latency satellite internet across the globe. These new mega-constellations rely on tens of thousands of small low earth orbit satellites flying at a few hundred miles altitude. Network interconnectivity is a basic building block for…

The motion of an electron in a strong infrared laser field is tracked in real time by means of a novel method developed by MPIK physicists and applied to confirm quantum-dynamics theory by cooperating researchers at MPI-PKS. The experimental approach links the absorption spectrum of the ionizing extreme ultraviolet pulse to the free-electron motion driven by the subsequent near-infrared pulse. For this experimental scheme, the classical description of the electron motion is justified even though it is a quantum object….

”When pentacene is excited by light, the electrons in the material rapidly react,” explains Prof. Ralph Ernstorfer, a senior author of the study. “It was an open and very disputed question whether a photon excites two electrons directly or initially one electron, which subsequently shares its energy with another electron.” To unravel this mystery the researchers used time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, a cutting-edge technique to observe the dynamics of electrons on the femtosecond time scale, which is a billionth…

Alexandrite laser crystals are well suited for use in earth observation satellites. They are robust and enable laser systems with a tunable output wavelength. In the European Horizon 2020 project GALACTIC, the partners Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH), Optomaterials S.r.l. (Italy) and Altechna (Lithuania) have now succeeded in establishing a solely European supply chain for alexandrite laser crystals, which can be used for space applications. The Italian partner Optomaterials produces competitive crystals, which the Lithuanian company Altechna provides with a…

Manual can help debug and design nanomagnet devices. An international team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and the Institute of Magnetism in Kyiv, Ukraine, has developed a comprehensive manual for engineering spin dynamics in nanomagnets – an important step toward advancing spintronic and quantum-information technologies. Despite their small size, nanomagnets — found in most spintronic applications — reveal rich dynamics of spin excitations, or “magnons,” the quantum-mechanical units of spin fluctuations. Due to its nanoscale confinement, a…

People are able to perceive their surroundings in three dimensions and can quickly spot potential danger in everyday situations. Drones have to learn this. Prof. Stefan Leutenegger refers to the intelligence needed for this task as ‘spatial artificial intelligence’, or spatial AI. This new approach will be used by cartographers mapping forests, in ship inspections and when building walls. To accomplish spatial AI, a drone must be able to establish its orientation in space and to generate a map of…

Reversible logic gates designed for large scale integer factorization. Large numbers can only be factorized with a great deal of computational effort. Physicists at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, led by Wolfgang Lechner are now providing a blueprint for a new type of quantum computer to solve the factorization problem, which is a cornerstone of modern cryptography. Today’s computers are based on microprocessors that execute so-called gates. A gate can, for example, be an AND operation, i.e. an operation that…

Researchers in Germany and the U.S.A. have shown for the first time that terahertz (THz) light pulses can stabilize ferromagnetism in a crystal at temperatures more than three times its usual transition temperature. As the team reports in Nature, using pulses just hundreds of femtoseconds long (a millionth of a billionth of a second), a ferromagnetic state was induced at high temperature in the rare-earth titanate YTiO₃ which persisted for many nanoseconds after the light exposure. Below the equilibrium transition…

They are called UFOs, but aliens have nothing to do with them. They are the ultra-fast outflows: space winds that emerge from the surroundings of supermassive black holes and blow at speeds close to that of light. An international research team has explored this still little-understood phenomenon, hunting for these gas emissions, which are crucial to understanding the mechanisms regulating the behaviour of supermassive black holes in their active phase. The research project is called SUBWAYS (SUper massive Black hole Winds in the x-rAYS) and the first…

GOES-U, the fourth and final satellite in NOAA’s GOES-R Series, recently completed a successful test deployment of its solar array to ensure it will function properly in space. This critical test verified that the satellite’s large, five-panel solar array — which is folded up when the satellite is launched — will properly deploy when GOES-U reaches geostationary orbit. During this test, engineers unfurled the five panels on rails that simulated the zero-gravity environment of space. Each solar panel is approximately 13…