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Graphene-powered soft lens could pave the way for smarter glasses, cameras and medical devices

The ability to change focus instantly is something most people take for granted. Every day, our eyes effortlessly switch between reading a book, recognizing a face across the room or watching a bird fly overhead. Replicating that remarkable technological flexibility, however, has proved far more difficult.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, led by Professor James Busfield, have taken an important step toward making adaptive lenses smaller, lighter and more practical by developing a transparent graphene-based material that allows soft lenses to change focus electronically without bulky moving parts. The work has eliminated key design constraints limiting electrostatically actuated lenses, opening the door to opportunities for compact medical imaging devices, autofocus cameras and wearable displays.

Published in Advanced Functional Materials, the study demonstrates how ultrathin transparent electrodes made from reduced graphene oxide can be integrated into a soft, electrically driven lens. The result is a compact device capable of changing its focal distance simply by applying a small electric field.

Quantum heat circuits learn electronics’ oldest trick: Sharing a power supply

Every electronic and optoelectronic device generates heat, and today that heat is managed almost entirely from the outside. Heatsinks, fans, cold plates and refrigerators are bulky exterior measures bolted onto a chip or package after the fact. They treat heat as a single averaged quantity to be removed in bulk, even though the heat is actually produced locally, component by component, deep inside the circuitry.

Quantum thermal devices offer a fundamentally different approach. Because they are tiny, heat-management circuitry can, in principle, be built right next to each electronic or optoelectronic component that needs it.

Instead of one bulk, averaged solution for an entire chip, each component could have its own tailored thermal circuit beside it, steering heat away exactly where it arises. That is the long-term technological promise motivating this field.

Distant time crystals oscillate in unison, paving the way for spin networks

In January 2024, physicists at TU Dortmund University demonstrated a continuous time crystal in a semiconductor whose oscillations remained stable for hours. In a new study published in Nature Communications, Professor Alex Greilich and his team show that many such time crystals can form in the same material and synchronize their electron-nuclear spin oscillations.

Time crystals are systems whose internal dynamics repeat periodically in time without being driven by a periodic external signal. In the TU Dortmund experiment, they are created in a semiconductor made of gallium arsenide containing small amounts of indium and silicon, which provides localized electrons. At temperatures close to −270°C (−454°F), each electron interacts with about one million surrounding nuclear spins.

A pump laser aligns the electron spins, which transfer their polarization to the nuclear spins. In a weak magnetic field, the nuclear-spin polarization begins to rotate. The resulting feedback between the electron and nuclear spins sustains the oscillations, while a second laser is used to observe them.

Discovery of ‘slow’ electrons in 2D material could lead to new memory device

Over the last decade, researchers have developed two-dimensional materials with fascinating quantum effects that could be harnessed for next-generation technologies.

Such materials have shown superconductivity—conducting electricity without energy loss—and charge orders, where electrons arrange in frozen patterns rather than moving freely in the material.

At the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), a research team discovered that one such material, Fe5GeTe2, exhibits a charge-ordered state in which electrons move collectively and unusually slowly while remaining quantum coherent.

‘Lying mirror’ uses structured surfaces to conceal optical information

Mirrors normally reveal what is placed in front of them, even when their curvature distorts a reflection. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have introduced a different optical concept: a “lying mirror” that hides information carried by an input image and transforms it into a misleading, ordinary-looking pattern at the output. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The all-optical system combines a reflective mirror with an optimized structured diffractive surface. Instead of using a computer to digitally alter an image, the lying mirror performs the transformation through programmed light diffraction and passive light-matter interactions. Once the diffractive surface is designed and fabricated, the optical transformation that hides the input information requires no digital computation.

Real-time measurements reveal antiferromagnetic skyrmions move in line with an applied current

Skyrmions—essentially magnetic vortices—represent a promising approach in spintronics; in the future, they could serve as components in storage media or computers, potentially complementing established CMOS technologies. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have now visualized the interaction of antiferromagnetic skyrmions for the first time and shown that antiferromagnetic skyrmions move reproducibly along straight trajectories aligned with the driving electric current.

“Our results establish a quantitative framework for the interactions of antiferromagnetic skyrmions. In doing so, they pave the way for spintronic devices based on large numbers of skyrmions,” said Mona Bhukta from the research group of professor Mathias Kläui at the JGU Institute of Physics. The researchers published their findings today in the journal Nature Physics.

Tiny particles defy action-reaction symmetry to stay in motion

From schools of fish and flocks of birds to microscopic synthetic particles, many systems in nature and the laboratory consist of individual units or agents that move by consuming energy. These systems are known as active matter because their components continuously use energy to generate motion, either individually or through interactions with their environment.

Inspired by such systems, researchers have become increasingly interested in nonreciprocal interactions, in which the influence one particle exerts on another is not equally returned. In other words, one particle can affect another more strongly than it is affected in return, effectively breaking action-reaction symmetry. This is surprising because, under Newton’s third law, passive particles cannot continuously push one another in the same direction.

In this system, however, nonequilibrium electrohydrodynamic flows allow one particle to effectively “chase” another, so activity emerges even though the particles themselves are not self-propelled. Such asymmetry can generate entirely new forms of collective motion and self-organization. However, experimental realizations have largely been limited to small particle clusters.

Schizophrenia’s Brain Damage May Start in One Key Region

Schizophrenia may leave a distinctive biological footprint across the brain’s communication network.

Using specialized PET imaging, researchers have mapped where synaptic connections are most reduced in people with schizophrenia and identified a possible region from which the damage begins to spread.

The study, which involved a Rutgers professor, was published in Molecular Psychiatry.

Scientists Catch a Hidden Electronic State Forming Almost Instantly

Researchers observed a hidden state triggered by light forming within 30 femtoseconds.

A pulse of light sent a metal-organic framework into a hidden electronic state in just 30 femtoseconds. By watching the transformation almost as it happened, researchers uncovered a fleeting intermediate stage that appears to guide the material into its new state.

The work was conducted by researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo, Tohoku University, and Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan. Combining ultrafast laser spectroscopy with theoretical calculations allowed them to identify the transient electronic state and clarify its role in the rapid transition. The results could improve efforts to control material properties using light.

This AI Can Find the Missing Atoms That X-Rays Cannot See

An AI model adapted from image inpainting can reconstruct missing atoms in crystal structures with a reported 97 percent success rate.

A crystal structure can appear nearly complete yet still be unusable for computer simulations because some of its atoms are missing. Hydrogen is a frequent source of these gaps, and researchers have now adapted an artificial intelligence technique used to repair images to predict where those hidden atoms belong.

The approach was developed by a team led by Giovanni Pizzi of the PSI Center for Scientific Computing, Theory and Data, working with researchers from the universities of Parma and Modena in Italy. Described in npj Computational Materials, the method applies computer vision, in which AI recognizes and interprets visual information, to incomplete crystal structures.

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