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Category: particle physics – Page 128

There is now a new addition to the magnetic family: thanks to experiments at the Swiss Light Source SLS, researchers have proved the existence of altermagnetism. The experimental discovery of this new branch of magnetism is reported in Nature and signifies new fundamental physics, with major implications for spintronics.

Magnetism is a lot more than just things that stick to the fridge. This understanding came with the discovery of antiferromagnets nearly a century ago. Since then, the family of magnetic materials has been divided into two fundamental phases: the ferromagnetic branch known for several millennia and the antiferromagnetic branch.

The experimental proof of a third branch of magnetism, termed altermagnetism, was made at the Swiss Light Source SLS, by an international collaboration led by the Czech Academy of Sciences together with Paul Scherrer Institute PSI.

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Quantum computing engineers at UNSW Sydney have shown they can encode quantum information—the special data in a quantum computer—in four unique ways within a single atom, inside a silicon chip.

The feat could alleviate some of the challenges in operating tens of millions of quantum computing units in just a few square millimeters of a silicon quantum computer chip.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the engineers describe how they used the 16 quantum ‘states’ of an antimony atom to encode quantum information.

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CERN has announced that they are to release a cut-down version of their popular Hadron Collider for use in the home.

The Large Hadron Collider was built over twenty years ago, is housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel on the Switzerland – France border, and is used to smash particles together to see what happens.

The facility has proven tremendously successful, having smashed over thirty particles together since it was built.

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RFID tags are commonly used to verify the authenticity of products, but they have some drawbacks. They are relatively large, expensive, and vulnerable to counterfeiting. A team of MIT engineers has developed a new type of ID tag that overcomes these limitations by using terahertz waves, which are smaller and faster than radio waves.

The new tag is a cryptographic chip several times smaller and cheaper than RFID tags. It also offers improved security, using the unique pattern of metal particles in the glue that attaches the tag to the item as a fingerprint. This way, the authentication system will detect tampering if someone tries to peel off the tag and stick it to a fake item.

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Sept 22 2016.

Kurzweilai – How the properties of quarks and gluons can be used (in principle) to perform computation at the femtometer (10^−15 meter) scale.

An atom is about 10^−10 m in size.

The next smallest thing in nature is the nucleus, which is about 100,000 times smaller, i.e., 10^−15 m in size — a femtometer, or “fermi.” A nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons (i.e., “nucleons”), which we now know are composed of 3 quarks, which are bound (“glued”) together by massless (photon-like) particles called “gluons.”

Continue reading “Femtotech: computing at the femtometer scale using quarks and gluons from Hugo de Garis” | >

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), in collaboration with Kansas State University, has discovered slab waveguides based on the two-dimensional material hexagonal boron nitride. This milestone has been reported in the journal Advanced Materials.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a class of materials that can be reduced to the monolayer limit by mechanically peeling the layers apart. The weak interlayer attractions (van der Waals attraction) allow the layers to be separated via the so-called “Scotch tape” method.

The most well-known 2D material, graphene, is a semimetallic material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. Recently, other 2D materials including semiconducting (TMDs) and insulating hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have also garnered attention. When reduced near the monolayer limit, 2D materials have unique nanoscale properties that are appealing for creating atomically thin electronic and .

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