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This week’s podcast features an interview with Ray LaPierre, who heads up the department of engineering physics at McMaster University in Canada. Ray talks to fellow Canadian Hamish Johnston about his research in semiconductor nanowires, in particular for use in photonics and quantum computers, and also shares his experiences of working at JDS Uniphase during the telecoms boom.

Physics World’s Anna Demming also joins the podcast to describe a flurry of new results in the emerging field of twistronics – where two layers of graphene are stacked on top of each other but twisted at a slight angle to each other. The discovery last year that bilayer graphene can become a superconductor if the two graphene layers are twisted at the so-called magic angle of 1.1º won Physics World’s 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, and since then the race has been on to investigate other angle-dependent properties of twisted bilayer graphene. Anna describes how different research teams are now trying to work out what causes these intriguing effects.

We also talk to industry editor Margaret Harris about the importance of technology and engineering for scientific progress. Margaret shares her own “light-bulb” moment, when she realized that new laser technology could have saved hours of experimental time during her PhD, and also highlights several articles in the latest Physics World Focus on Instruments and Vacuum that highlight how breakthrough scientific discoveries rely on developments in the enabling technologies – including the first images of a black hole that were revealed in April.

The phenomenon known as “tunneling” is one of the best-known predictions of quantum physics, because it so dramatically confounds our classical intuition for how objects ought to behave. If you create a narrow region of space that a particle would have to have a relatively high energy to enter, classical reasoning tells us that low-energy particles heading toward that region should reflect off the boundary with 100% probability. Instead, there is a tiny chance of finding those particles on the far side of the region, with no loss of energy. It’s as if they simply evaded the “barrier” region by making a “tunnel” through it.

It’s very important to note that this phenomenon is absolutely and unquestionably real, demonstrated in countless ways. The most dramatic of these is sunlight— the Sun wouldn’t be able to fuse hydrogen into helium without quantum tunneling— but it’s also got more down-to-earth technological applications. Tunneling serves as the basis for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, which uses the tunneling of electrons across a tiny gap between a sharp tip and a surface to produce maps of that surface that can readily resolve single atoms. It’s also essential for the Josephson effect, which is the basis of superconducting detectors of magnetic fields and some of the superconducting systems proposed for quantum computing.

So, there is absolutely no debate among physicists about whether quantum tunneling is a thing that happens. Physicists get a bit twitchy without something to argue over, though, and you don’t have to dig into tunneling (heh) very far to find a disputed question, namely “How long does quantum tunneling take?”

O.o!

A team of scientists recently determined certain quantum particles can regenerate after they’ve decayed. This has grand implications for the future of humanity, quantum computing, and intergalactic graffiti.

Theoretical physicists from the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute conducted simulation experiments to determine that certain quasiparticles are essentially immortal. Per the second law of thermodynamics nothing lasts forever, but these quantum particle fields can reassemble themselves after decaying – just like the phoenix from Greek mythology.

Continue reading “Scientists discover infinite decay and rebirth in quantum particles” »

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Alex Vikoulov is a futurist, digital philosopher, independent scholar, media commentator, essayist, author of the 2019 book “The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution.” Lives in San Francisco Bay Area. http://amazon.com/author/alexvikoulov

With Intel® Core™ i7 processor.

A wireless, wearable monitor built with stretchable electronics could allow comfortable, long-term health monitoring of adults, babies and small children without concern for skin injury or allergic reactions caused by conventional adhesive sensors with conductive gels.

The soft and conformable monitor can broadcast electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, respiratory rate and motion activity data as much as 15 meters to a portable recording device such as a smartphone or tablet computer. The electronics are mounted on a stretchable substrate and connected to gold, skin-like electrodes through printed connectors that can stretch with the medical film in which they are embedded.

“This health monitor has a key advantage for young children who are always moving, since the soft conformal device can accommodate that activity with a gentle integration onto the skin,” said Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This is designed to meet the electronic health monitoring needs of people whose sensitive skin may be harmed by conventional monitors.”

Did you know that you were being scanned via that rather colorful GUI as seen from the back of the car?

Panasonic JS970WP0118OS3 panasonic all in one terminals stingray III pro, loprofile capacitive, SSD, PWR, WIN7 PAN-JS970WP0118OS3.

ALON — Transparent Aluminum — is a ceramic composed of Aluminium, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Transparent Aluminum, was once pure science fiction, a technical term used in a Star Trek Movie from the 80’s.

In the movie Star Trek 4 The Voyage Home, Captain Kirk and his team, go back in time to acquire 2 whales from the past and transport them back to the future. Scotty needed some materials to make a holding tank for whales on his ship, but had no money to pay for the materials.

Continue reading “Transparent Aluminum — Star Trek Technology is now Real” »

A research team lead by Osaka University demonstrated how information encoded in the circular polarization of a laser beam can be translated into the spin state of an electron in a quantum dot, each being a quantum bit and a quantum computer candidate. The achievement represents a major step towards a “quantum internet,” in which future computers can rapidly and securely send and receive quantum information.

Quantum computers have the potential to vastly outperform current systems because they work in a fundamentally different way. Instead of processing discrete ones and zeros, quantum information, whether stored in electron spins or transmitted by laser photons, can be in a superposition of multiple states simultaneously. Moreover, the states of two or more objects can become entangled, so that the status of one cannot be completely described without this other. Handling entangled states allow quantum computers to evaluate many possibilities simultaneously, as well as transmit information from place to place immune from eavesdropping.

However, these entangled states can be very fragile, lasting only microseconds before losing coherence. To realize the goal of a quantum internet, over which coherent light signals can relay quantum information, these signals must be able to interact with electron spins inside distant computers.