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A material coating, whose light refraction properties can be precisely switched between different states, has been developed by an interdisciplinary research team from the Chemistry and Physics departments at the University of Jena. The team, led by Felix Schacher, Sarah Walden, Purushottam Poudel, and Isabelle Staude, combined polymers that react to light with so-called metasurfaces.

This innovation has led to the creation of new optical components that could potentially be used in signal processing. Their findings have now been published in the journal ACS Nano.

Networks can represent changing systems, like the spread of an epidemic or the growth of groups in a population of people. But the structure of these networks can change, too, as links appear or vanish over time. To better understand these changes, researchers often study a series of static “snapshots” that capture the structure of the network during a short duration.

Network theorists have sought ways to combine these snapshots. In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, a trio of SFI-affiliated researchers describe a novel way to aggregate static snapshots into smaller clusters of networks while still preserving the dynamic nature of the system. Their method, inspired by an idea from quantum mechanics, involves testing successive pairs of network snapshots to find those for which a combination would result in the smallest effect on the dynamics of the system—and then combining them.

Importantly, it can determine how to simplify the history of the network’s structure as much as possible while maintaining accuracy. The math behind the method is fairly simple, says lead author Andrea Allen, now a data scientist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

If the fractional quantum Hall regime were a series of highways, these highways would have either two or four lanes. The flow of the two-flux or four-flux composite fermions, like automobiles in this two-to four-flux composite fermion traffic scenario, naturally explains the more than 90 fractional quantum Hall states that form in a large variety of host materials. Physicists at Purdue University have recently discovered, though, that fractional quantum Hall regimes are not limited to two-flux or four-flux and have discovered the existence of a new type of emergent particle, which they are calling six-flux composite fermion.

They have recently published their groundbreaking findings in Nature Communications.

Gabor Csathy, professor and head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Purdue University College of Science, along with Ph.D. students Haoyun Huang, Waseem Hussain, and recent Ph.D. graduate Sean Myers, led this discovery from the West Lafayette campus of Purdue. Csathy credits lead author Huang as having conceived and led the measurements, and having written a large part of the manuscript. All the ultra-low-temperature measurements were completed in Csathy’s Physics Building lab. His lab conducts research on strongly correlated electron physics, sometimes referred to as topological electron physics.

Researchers report in the journal Cell that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin—and, by extension, our large, complex brains.

The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or “retrotransposon” is essential for myelin production in mammals, amphibians, and fish. The gene sequence, which they dubbed “RetroMyelin,” is likely a result of ancient viral infection, and comparisons of RetroMyelin in mammals, amphibians, and fish suggest that retroviral infection and genome-invasion events occurred separately in each of these groups.

“Retroviruses were required for vertebrate evolution to take off,” says senior author and neuroscientist Robin Franklin of Altos Labs-Cambridge Institute of Science. “If we didn’t have retroviruses sticking their sequences into the vertebrate genome, then myelination wouldn’t have happened, and without myelination, the whole diversity of vertebrates as we know it would never have happened.”

Physicists from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have uncovered that Josephson tunnel junctions—the fundamental building blocks of superconducting quantum computers—are more complex than previously thought.

Just like overtones in a musical instrument, harmonics are superimposed on the fundamental mode. As a consequence, corrections may lead to quantum bits that are two to seven times more stable. The researchers support their findings with experimental evidence from multiple laboratories across the globe, including the University of Cologne, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and IBM Quantum in New York.

It all started in 2019, when Dr. Dennis Willsch and Dennis Rieger—two Ph.D. students from FZJ and KIT at the time and joint first authors of a new paper published in Nature Physics —were having a hard time understanding their experiments using the standard model for Josephson tunnel junctions. This model had won Brian Josephson the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

Self-assembled solidifying eutectic materials directed by a template with miniature features demonstrate unique microstructures and patterns as a result of diffusion and thermal gradients caused by the template. Despite the template trying to force the material to solidify into a regular pattern, when the template carries a lot of heat it also can interfere with the solidification process and cause disorder in the long-range pattern.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan Ann Arbor have developed a template material that carries almost no heat and therefore stops heat transfer between the template material itself and the solidifying eutectic material. They accomplished this by forming the template from a material with very low thermal conductivity, ultimately resulting in highly organized self-assembled microstructures.

The results of this research were recently published in the journal Advanced Materials.

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A 3D printed ‘metamaterial’ boasting levels of strength for weight not normally seen in nature or manufacturing could change how we make everything from medical implants to aircraft or rocket parts.

RMIT University researchers created the new metamaterial—a term used to describe an artificial material with unique properties not observed in nature—from common titanium alloy.

But it’s the material’s unique lattice structure design, recently revealed in the journal Advanced Materials, that makes it anything but common: tests show it’s 50% stronger than the next strongest alloy of similar density used in aerospace applications.

A new technique in quantum storage that operates at room temperature could pave the way for a quantum internet.