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Researchers have developed a revolutionary material that can help eliminate microplastics, one of the most pervasive artificial contaminants in nature, from our waterways.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science have created a sustainable hydrogel — a polymer-based material that can adapt its structure to its environment even after absorbing water — with a “unique intertwined polymer network” that binds the microplastics and breaks them down using UV light, the institute summarized on its website.

Continue reading “Scientists develop breakthrough gel material that could remove one of the most common pollutants — here’s how it works” »

An international collaboration of researchers, led by Philip Walther at University of Vienna, have achieved a significant breakthrough in quantum technology, with the successful demonstration of quantum interference among several single photons using a novel resource-efficient platform. The work published in the journal Science Advances represents a notable advancement in optical quantum computing that paves the way for more scalable quantum technologies.

Interference among photons, a fundamental phenomenon in quantum optics, serves as a cornerstone of optical quantum computing.

It involves harnessing the properties of light, such as its wave-particle duality, to induce interference patterns, enabling the encoding and processing of quantum information.

Plasma, particles and energy released from the Sun on Thursday are heading for Earth and they could produce a light show in the sky visible into the Deep South.

BASEL, Switzerland — A reliable and ultra-powerful quantum computer could finally be on the horizon. Researchers from the University of Basel and the NCCR SPIN in Switzerland have made an exciting advancement in the world of quantum computing, achieving the first controllable interaction between two “hole spin qubits” inside a standard silicon transistor. This leap forward could eventually allow quantum computer chips to carry millions of qubits — a feat that would drastically scale up their processing power and potentially replace the modern computer.

First, we need to explain some of the high-tech terms involved in the new study published in Nature Physics. A qubit is the quantum equivalent of a bit, the fundamental building block of data in conventional computing. While a standard bit can be either a 0 or a 1, qubits can be both simultaneously, thanks to the principles of quantum mechanics. This allows quantum computers to handle complex calculations at speeds today’s standard computers will never achieve.

The concept of hole spin qubits might sound even more abstract. In simple terms, in the materials used for making computer chips, electrons (tiny particles with negative charge) move around, and sometimes they leave behind empty spaces or “holes.”

The nuclear reactions that power the stars and forge the elements emerge from the interactions of the quantum mechanical particles, protons and neutrons. Explaining these processes is one of the most challenging unsolved problems in computational physics. As the mass of the colliding nuclei grows, the resources required to model them outpace even the most powerful conventional computers. Quantum computers could perform the necessary computations. However, they currently fall short of the required number of reliable and long-lived quantum bits. This research combined conventional computers and quantum computers to significantly accelerate the prospects of solving this problem.

The Impact

The researchers successfully used the hybrid computing scheme to simulate the scattering of two neutrons. This opens a path to computing nuclear reaction rates that are difficult or impossible to measure in a laboratory. These include reaction rates that play a role in astrophysics and national security. The hybrid scheme will also aid in simulating the properties of other quantum mechanical systems. For example, it could help researchers study the scattering of electrons with quantized atomic vibrations known as phonons, a process that underlies superconductivity.

This groundbreaking approach may reveal the most mysterious elements in the cosmos.

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Particle physics have conducted a test using data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to see if the particles in their collisions play by the rules of quantum physics — whether they have quantum entanglement. Why was this test conducted when previous tests already found that entanglement is real? Is it just nonsense or is it not nonsense? Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “CERN Looks for Origins of Quantum Randomness” »

What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off. A new class of synthetic materials could herald the next revolution of wireless technologies, enabling devices to be smaller, require less signal strength and use less power.

The key to these advances lies in what experts call phononics, which is similar to photonics. Both take advantage of similar physical laws and offer new ways to advance technology. While photonics takes advantage of photons – or light – phononics does the same with phonons, which are the physical particles that transmit mechanical vibrations through a material, akin to sound, but at frequencies much too high to hear.

In a paper published in Nature Materials (“Giant electron-mediated phononic nonlinearity in semiconductor–piezoelectric heterostructures”), researchers at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences and Sandia National Laboratories report clearing a major milestone toward real-world applications based on phononics. By combining highly specialized semiconductor materials and piezoelectric materials not typically used together, the researchers were able to generate giant nonlinear interactions between phonons. Together with previous innovations demonstrating amplifiers for phonons using the same materials, this opens up the possibility of making wireless devices such as smartphones or other data transmitters smaller, more efficient and more powerful.

The hydrogen atom was once considered the simplest atom in nature, composed of a structureless electron and a structured proton. However, as research progressed, scientists discovered a simpler type of atom, consisting of structureless electrons, muons, or tauons and their equally structureless antiparticles. These atoms are bound together solely by electromagnetic interactions, with simpler structures than hydrogen atoms, providing a new perspective on scientific problems such as quantum mechanics, fundamental symmetry, and gravity.