Experiment demonstrates solar system’s fragility. A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment. UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science. The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and…

Data security is one of the most important issues in today’s digital age. Increasing system attacks and cybercrime make it necessary to secure data in new ways. For this purpose, the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS developed the MACsec Controller IP-Core, which implements the latest Ethernet security standards. It provides authentication, integrity and encryption of data between different nodes of a Local Area Network (LAN). Fraunhofer IPMS has been developing and licensing IP cores to companies from a wide…

OpenSuperQPlus unites 28 European research partners from 10 countries aiming to develop a 1,000 qubit quantum computer. The project OpenSuperQPlus – part of the European Quantum Technology Flagship – gets underway. It is continuing and enhancing the project OpenSuperQ and brings together most of its team with new partners – including the key partners of the national initiatives of the Netherlands, France, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Sweden, full-stack quantum computing startups and many other key players in the field. The…

Nature article reflects HRL leadership in silicon qubit technology. HRL Laboratories, LLC, has published the first demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits. This newly emerging approach to quantum computation uses a novel silicon-based qubit device architecture, fabricated in HRL’s Malibu cleanroom, to trap single electrons in quantum dots. Spins of three such single electrons host energy-degenerate qubit states, which are controlled by nearest-neighbor contact interactions that partially swap spin states with those of their neighbors. Posted online ahead…

… only observed in black holes. X-ray binaries are systems formed by a compact object, a neutron star or a black hole, and a star of a similar size to the Sun. The compact object swallows matter from the companion star through a disk that emits large amounts of light, especially in X-rays. This process in which the compact object attracts matter, known as accretion, usually occurs in violent eruptions during which the system becomes up to a thousand times…

Ice-cold electron beams simulated in research at the University of Strathclyde could pave the way to reducing X-ray free-electron lasers (X-FELs) to a fraction of their current size.  X-FELs convert the kinetic energy of an electron beam into powerful photon pulses, down to hard X-ray wavelengths, and are often called ‘engines of discovery.’ X-FELs are used to create extreme matter conditions for hot-dense matter research, to study properties of materials for next-generation microchips, to resolve the structure of complex biomolecules…

Quantum effects can play an important role in chemical reactions. Physicists led by Roland Wester of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have now for the first time observed a quantum mechanical tunneling reaction in experiments. The observation can also be described exactly in theory. With the study published in Nature, the scientists provide an important reference for this fundamental effect in chemistry. It is the slowest reaction with charged particles ever observed. Tunneling reactions in chemistry are very difficult to…

The honeycomb patterns which are often found in salt deserts in Death Valley and Chile, among other places, look like something from another world. Researchers, including those from TU Graz, explain the origin of the mysterious patterns for the first time. Honeycomb patterns form in salt deserts all over the world, for example in the Badwater Basin of Death Valley in California or in the Salar de Uyuni in Chile. These enigmatic salt structures attract tens of thousands of visitors…

… confirms existence of a new family of quantum matter. Like finding a hidden world, physicists dialing up the magnetic field on a semiconducting material have discovered the first in a new family of matter that flowers from the bizarre realm of the quantum scale. In what researchers dubbed the bubble phase of composite fermions, pairs of quasiparticles – particle-like entities arising from the interaction of particles – align in a crystalline pattern, allowing electricity to flow along the edge of…

Researchers introduce metasurfaces to create waveform-selective antennas that can distinguish between signals of same frequency. When you tap on your phone screen to check something on the internet, you make use of wireless communications technology. With the advent of 5G networks, this technology has made our lives easier than we could imagine. As we progress towards 6G communication, the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to monitor and perform tasks is becoming inevitable. As a result, there is a…

A liquid nitrogen spray developed by Washington State University researchers can remove almost all of the simulated moon dust from a space suit, potentially solving what is a significant challenge for future moon-landing astronauts. The sprayer removed more than 98% of moon dust simulant in a vacuum environment with minimal damage to spacesuits, performing better than any techniques that have been investigated previously. The researchers report on their work in the journal, Acta Astronautica. While people have managed to put men…

Tailor-made laser light fields can be used to slow down the movement of several particles and thus cool them down to extremely low temperatures – as shown by a team from TU Wien. Using lasers to slow down atoms is a technique that has been used for a long time already: If one wants to achieve low-temperature world records in the range of absolute temperature zero, one resorts to laser cooling, in which energy is extracted from the atoms with…

Astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the Vatican Observatory (VO) teamed up to spectroscopically survey more than 1000 bright stars that potentially host exoplanets. The team presents precise values of 54 spectroscopic parameters per star in the first of a series of papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and releases all its data to the scientific community. This unprecedented large number of parameters will be essential to interpret the stellar light and find connections between…

The seismic reflection method involves sending acoustic waves thousands of meters under the Earth’s surface. The reflected signals provide scientists with information about the characteristics of the subsurface. This is how oil and gas deposits can be discovered. While these will eventually no longer be extracted as we move away from fossil fuels, accurate knowledge of rock structures is important for better understanding known reservoirs. The Earth’s subsurface could be a key place to store greenhouse gases. With improved machine…

A new form of heterostructure of layered two-dimensional (2D) materials may enable quantum computing to overcome key barriers to its widespread application, according to an international team of researchers. The researchers were led by a team that is part of the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science (CNS), one of 19 Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) in the United States funded by the National Science Foundation. Their work was published Feb. 13 in Nature Materials.  A regular computer consists of billions…

The device could help workers locate objects for fulfilling e-commerce orders or identify parts for assembling products. MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like…