Lifeboat Foundation

This spacecraft got a good look at Earth on its way to Jupiter.

For the first time, physicists have observed novel quantum effects in a topological insulator at room temperature. This breakthrough, published as the cover article of the October issue of Nature Materials, came when Princeton scientists explored a topological material based on the element bismuth.

The scientists have used topological insulators to demonstrate quantum effects for more than a decade, but this experiment is the first time these effects have been observed at room temperature. Typically, inducing and observing quantum states in topological insulators requires temperatures around absolute zero, which is equal to-459 degrees Fahrenheit (or-273 degrees Celsius).

This finding opens up a new range of possibilities for the development of efficient quantum technologies, such as spin-based electronics, which may potentially replace many current electronic systems for higher energy efficiency.

face_with_colon_three Tricorder from star trek here we come. #Singularity

An instrument found on workbenches around the world has been scaled down enough to be used in a smartphone.

Circa 2020 face_with_colon_three

The organism could be used to protect humans and equipment on the International Space Station.

Until recently, it was widely believed among physicists that it was impossible to compress light below the so-called diffraction limit (see below), except when using metal nanoparticles, which unfortunately also absorb light. It therefore seemed impossible to compress light strongly in dielectric materials such as silicon, which are key materials in information technologies and come with the important advantage that they do not absorb light.

Interestingly, it was shown theoretically in 2006 that the diffraction limit also does not apply to dielectrics. Still, no one has succeeded in showing this in the real world, simply because no one has been able to build the necessary dielectric nanostructures until now.

A research team from DTU has successfully designed and built a structure, a so-called dielectric nanocavity, which concentrates light in a volume 12 times below the diffraction limit. The result is groundbreaking in optical research and has just been published in Nature Communications.

In February 2019, JQI Fellow Alicia Kollár, who is also an assistant professor of physics at UMD, bumped into Adrian Chapman, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, at a quantum information conference. Although the two came from very different scientific backgrounds, they quickly discovered that their research had a surprising commonality. They both shared an interest in graph theory, a field of math that deals with points and the connections between them.

Chapman found graphs through his work in quantum error correction —a field that deals with protecting fragile quantum information from errors in an effort to build ever-larger quantum computers. He was looking for new ways to approach a long-standing search for the Holy Grail of quantum error correction: a way of encoding quantum information that is resistant to errors by construction and doesn’t require active correction. Kollár had been pursuing new work in graph theory to describe her photon-on-a-chip experiments, but some of her results turned out to be the missing piece in Chapman’s puzzle.

Their ensuing collaboration resulted in a new tool that aids in the search for new quantum error correction schemes—including the Holy Grail of self-correcting quantum error correction. They published their findings recently in the journal Physical Review X Quantum.

Experiments have shown how the world’s hardiest microbe could endure freezing, dry and irradiated conditions on Mars.

The world wide web is not enough, because scientists have managed to transmit data at a staggering 1.84 petabits per second — nearly twice the amount of global internet traffic in the same interval.

That blows the previous record for data transmission using a single light source and optical chip of one petabit per second out the water. And to put that ridiculous amount into perspective, a petabit is equal to one million gigabits. A single gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, is about the fastest download speed money can buy for most households.

To achieve the astonishing feat, researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Chalmers University of Technology used a custom optical chip that can make use of a single infrared light by splitting it into hundreds of different frequencies that are evenly spaced apart. Collectively, they’re known as a frequency comb. Each frequency on the comb can discretely hold data by modulating the wave properties of light, allowing scientists to transmit far more bits than conventional methods.

The large diversity of organic molecules detected on Mars is a hint that life once existed there, but where should we search?

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