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Category: computing

Engineers just created a “phonon laser” that could shrink your next smartphone

Engineers have created a device that generates incredibly tiny, earthquake-like vibrations on a microchip—and it could transform future electronics. Using a new kind of “phonon laser,” the team can produce ultra-fast surface waves that already play a hidden role in smartphones, GPS systems, and wireless tech. Unlike today’s bulky setups, this single-chip device could deliver far higher performance using less power, opening the door to smaller, faster, and more efficient phones and wireless devices.

This Quantum Discovery May Bypass the ‘No-Cloning Theorem,’ Opening the Door to Quantum Cloud Storage

Scientists have demonstrated a new method that could allow quantum information to be safely backed up, overcoming one of the longest-standing limitations in quantum computing without violating the fundamental laws that govern quantum systems.

The research describes a way to encode the information contained in a qubit across multiple entangled systems, allowing the original quantum state to be recovered later without directly copying it.

New map reveals a rugged world beneath the Antarctic ice sheet

Scientists have discovered there is more to Antarctica than meets the eye. A new map of the landscape beneath the frozen continent’s ice sheet has revealed a previously hidden world of mountains, deep canyons and rugged hills in unprecedented detail.

The Antarctic ice sheet is a vast expanse of ice covering approximately 98% of the continent. While the frozen surface has been fairly well-studied, the ground beneath this two-kilometer-thick layer has remained a mystery. In fact, until now, we knew more about the surface of Mars than what lies beneath the bottom of our own planet.

The ice sheet plays a crucial role in our climate. Not only is it a major freshwater reservoir, but its icy surface reflects sunlight, helping cool Earth. But because our computer models are missing key details about the land it sits on, it is difficult to predict factors such as exactly how fast the ice will melt and how much sea levels will rise.

Rocks and rolls: The computational infrastructure of earthquakes and physics of planetary science

Sometimes to truly study something up close, you have to take a step back. That’s what Andrea Donnellan does. An expert in Earth sciences and seismology, she gets much of her data from a bird’s-eye view, studying the planet’s surface from the air and space, using the data to make discoveries and deepen understanding about earthquakes and other geological processes.

“The history of Earth processes is written in the landscapes,” Donnellan said. “Studying Earth’s surface can help us understand what is happening now and what might happen in the future.”

Donnellan, professor and head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in Purdue’s College of Science, has watched Earth for a long time. Her original research was studying and tracking glaciers in Antarctica.

Magnetic fields slow carbon migration in iron by altering energy barriers, study shows

Professor Dallas Trinkle and colleagues have provided the first quantitative explanation for how magnetic fields slow carbon atom movement through iron, a phenomenon first observed in the 1970s but never fully understood. Published in Physical Review Letters, their computer simulations reveal that magnetic field alignment changes the energy barriers between atomic “cages,” offering potential pathways to reduce the energy costs and CO2 emissions associated with steel processing.

An alloy of iron and carbon, steel is one of the most-used building materials on the planet. Engineering its microstructure requires high temperatures; as a result, most steel processing consumes significant energy. In the 1970s, scientists noted that some steels exhibited better properties when heat treated under a magnetic field—but their ideas explaining this behavior were only conceptual. Understanding the mechanism behind this phenomenon could improve engineers’ ability to control heat treatment, improving material processing and potentially lowering energy costs.

“The previous explanations for this behavior were phenomenological at best,” said Trinkle, the Ivan Racheff Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and the senior author of the paper. “When you’re designing a material, you need to be able to say, ‘If I add this element, this is how (the material) will change.’ And we had no understanding of how this was happening; there was nothing predictive about it.”

Detecting single-electron qubits: Microwaves could probe quantum states above liquid helium

One intriguing method that could be used to form the qubits needed for quantum computers involves electrons hovering above liquid helium. But it wasn’t clear how data in this form could be read easily.

Now RIKEN researchers may have found a solution. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

X-ray four-wave mixing captures elusive electron interactions inside atoms and molecules

Scientists at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL have realized a long-pursued experimental goal in physics: to show how electrons dance together. The technique, known as X-ray four-wave mixing, opens a new way to see how energy and information flow within atoms and molecules. In the future, it could illuminate how quantum information is stored and lost, eventually aiding the design of more error-tolerant quantum devices. The findings are reported in Nature.

Much of the behavior of matter arises not from electrons acting alone, but from the ways they influence each other. From chemical systems to advanced materials, their interactions shape how molecules rearrange, how materials conduct or insulate and how energy flows.

In many quantum technologies —not least quantum computing—information is stored in delicate patterns of these interactions, known as coherences. When these coherences are lost, information disappears—a process known as decoherence. Learning how to understand and ultimately control such fleeting states is one of the major challenges facing quantum technologies today.

First breathing ‘lung-on-chip’ developed using genetically identical cells

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and AlveoliX have developed the first human lung-on-chip model using stem cells taken from only one person. These chips simulate breathing motions and lung disease in an individual, holding promise for testing treatments for infections like tuberculosis (TB) and delivering personalized medicine.

The research is published in the journal Science Advances.

Air sacs in the lungs called alveoli are the essential site of gas exchange and also an important barrier against inhaled viruses and bacteria that cause respiratory diseases like flu or TB.

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication

Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected. By drawing on issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology, we can be much better prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.

NASA SP-2013–4413

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