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A blue laser for underwater communication and sensing

Researchers at EPFL have developed a chip-scale blue laser that combines stable light emission with rapid frequency control, opening possibilities for underwater communication, environmental sensing and quantum technologies.

Blue light has some useful properties: it travels through water more easily than infrared light, which is widely used in today’s optical communication systems. It also scatters strongly when it encounters tiny particles in the air. These properties make blue lasers attractive for underwater communication, pollution monitoring and scientific instruments.

But these applications demand precise control over the laser’s light. For example, the frequency must remain stable enough to distinguish a useful signal from background noise, while also changing rapidly when needed to transmit information or make measurements.

Theoretical method uses light to locate anyons, potential quantum computing building blocks

Theoretical physicists at Emory University have discovered a way to use light to detect the “spectral fingerprints” of anyons—exotic quasiparticles that emerge from the collective behavior of many electrons. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters. The work offers a new tool for the study of anyons, which hold potential as fundamental building blocks for quantum computing.

“Using a particular frequency of light, we’ve developed a sensor that can pinpoint the location of an anyon in a material,” says Luiz Santos, professor of physics at Emory University and senior author of the study.

“The dream goal is the ability to manipulate anyons to achieve topological quantum computation,” says Tianhong Lu, first author of the paper and an Emory Ph.D. candidate in physics. “Our theoretical work takes another step in that direction.”

Measuring multiple reactions on a single electrode with extraordinary sensitivity

A reaction on a single electrode can tell scientists a remarkable amount about the chemical nature and number of analytes involved. The challenge comes when they want to distinguish many reactions on the same electrode. After more than a decade of trying to overcome that limitation, Ravi Saraf and his Nebraska Engineering graduate students have demonstrated a way to quantify many reactions on the same electrode without sacrificing extraordinary sensitivity.

The advancement, Saraf said, could lead to better early diagnoses of diseases such as cancer and improved assessment of injury from exposure to high-energy radiation.

“It is certainly one of the more exciting things I’ve done,” said Saraf, Lowell E. and Betty Anderson Distinguished Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

The ‘shape’ of gene expression: Identifying genes that may share roles across species

Much of what we know about biology comes from animal models, particularly mice. Applying these insights to humans, however, is not always straightforward. For example, some of the genes important for the formation of germ cells, which eventually give rise to eggs or sperm, differ between mice and humans.

To identify gene correspondences across species, researchers often compare DNA sequences. This helps establish evolutionary relationships between genes, but it does not always answer a more functional question: Which genes play similar regulatory roles within specific cell types or cell fate specification processes across species?

To explore this question, a team of researchers at Kyoto University’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi) looked at how genes are expressed in relation to one another. They reasoned that the overall organization of regulatory networks might remain similar across species, even when the genes involved differ.

Detailed images reveal ribosome assembly inside human cells for the first time

For decades, ribosomes have been under the lens of many scientists. Ribosomes are highly sophisticated and complex molecular machines that allow cells to synthesize proteins. However, putting ribosomes together requires intricate assembly processes. While many underlying mechanisms for building ribosomes have been discovered ex situ (outside their native cellular context), our understanding of how ribosomes are assembled in situ has so far remained limited.

Through a collaboration between the research groups of Christoph Müller, Sara Cuylen-Häring and Julia Mahamid at EMBL Heidelberg, researchers have now pushed these limits. By combining cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) with correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), they were able to image the nucleolus—the site of ribosome assembly inside cells—at sufficiently high resolution to visualize the ribosome assembly pathway inside intact human cells for the first time.

The results—a collection of molecular snapshots—yielded subnanometer-resolution in-cell structures of tens of intermediates along the ribosome assembly pathways, complementing and expanding previous insights into ribosome assembly obtained from ex situ structures. The new results have now been published in the journal Science.

Terahertz light distinguishes two groups of particles trapped inside superconducting vortices

Scientists at Rutgers and in Estonia have used invisible light to look into tiny magnetic whirlpools, called vortices, inside a superconductor, revealing details that could help researchers develop better materials for carrying electricity.

Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, distinguishes two groups of particles trapped within those vortices and measures properties that conventional techniques couldn’t readily separate.

“To improve superconductors, scientists need to understand what vortices contain and how they behave,” said Girsh Blumberg, a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study. “This study provides a new way to look inside them.”

Record-setting 2.75 gigahertz LED designed for fast, energy-efficient data centers

A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation bandwidth of 2.75 gigahertz while consuming just 25 milliwatts of power. Its design was optimized to bring newfound speed and efficiency to communication links in data centers.

As the team of researchers reports in IEEE Electron Device Letters, this achievement is the result of an extensive program of theoretical modeling and empirical testing, providing a roadmap to scaling down LED devices for optical communications.

For the record-breaking device, the design was optimized to a size of 5 micrometers. The team hopes that their design will prove to be a vast improvement in speed and efficiency over conventional wire interconnects and even laser-based optical links for short-range communication.

Machine learning helps track semiconductor defects under more realistic temperature conditions

All materials contain inherent defects. These are not always harmful, since they can be used to engineer and introduce certain properties into a material. However, it is crucial to understand how they function and how they affect the material’s properties.

To understand and model defects in different materials, researchers’ standard calculations are usually based on zero Kelvin, minus 273 degrees Celsius, the theoretically lowest possible temperature at which all atoms and molecules are completely stationary. But for materials intended for use in real-world products and everyday applications, it is essential to know how they behave at ordinary temperatures.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have now demonstrated a significantly more effective framework for calculating the properties of defects while accounting for different temperature effects, enabling results that are much closer to reality. The findings are presented in an article published in npj Computational Materials.

Electrical signals reveal hidden magnetic information in altermagnets for first time

Researchers have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to obtain from an altermagnet a spin current that can transport magnetic information. This result is supported by the theoretical model of electron transport developed by the CFM group. Altermagnets are a new class of materials that, despite not exhibiting the net magnetization characteristic of conventional magnets, can generate this type of current.

The result experimentally confirms a prediction made a few years ago by research groups in the Czech Republic and Germany, and represents an advance in the study of altermagnets and their potential for the development of new information storage and processing technologies.

The results of this study have been published in the journal Nature. The team includes CIC nanoGUNE’s Nanodevices Group, in collaboration with the Mesoscopic Physics Group of the Materials Physics Center (CFM) and research groups in the Czech Republic, Germany and France.

New Microscope Technology Captures the Hidden World Inside Living Cells Like Never Before

A new imaging technique allows scientists to capture fleeting cellular processes that conventional microscopes struggle to resolve.

Living cells are constantly in motion, but capturing their smallest structures in sharp detail has long been a challenge. Traditional super-resolution microscopy often requires hundreds or thousands of images to reveal features too small for conventional light microscopes. When structures move during that process, the resulting images can become blurred. Now, researchers have developed a technique that captures these microscopic details in a single camera exposure.

The new method, called Spatial Polarization-Induced Fluorescence Fluctuation Imaging (SPIFFI), was developed by a team led by Aleksandra Radenovic at the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology (LBEN) in EPFL’s School of Engineering. Published in Nature Methods, the research demonstrates up to a twofold improvement in image resolution, allowing scientists to distinguish structures as small as 160 to 170 nanometers while observing living cells.