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Researchers at Simon Fraser University have made a crucial breakthrough in the development of quantum technology.

Their research, published in Nature today, describes their observations of more than 150,000 silicon “T center” photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has enormous potential to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, materials science, medicine and cybersecurity.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.

Phonon-polaritons are collective oscillations of ions in polar dielectrics coupled to electromagnetic waves of light, whose electromagnetic field is much more compressed compared to the light wavelength. Recently, it was demonstrated that the phonon-polaritons in thin van der Waals crystals can be compressed even further when the material is placed on top of a highly conductive metal. In such a configuration, charges in the polaritonic crystal are “reflected” in the metal, and their coupling with light results in a new type of polariton waves called the image phonon-polaritons. Highly compressed image modes provide strong light-matter interactions, but are very sensitive to the substrate roughness, which hinders their practical application.

Challenged by these limitations, four research groups combined their efforts to develop a unique experimental platform using advanced fabrication and measurement methods. Their findings were published in Science Advances on July 13.

No homework. Grades you can change. This school is challenging everything about our approach to education — and it’s working with a 98% college acceptance rate.

How did the Arava, a punishingly hot and arid desert, become one of Israel’s breadbaskets? It’s a story of determination and thinking outside the box.

The discovery could inform the design of practical superconducting devices. When it comes to graphene, it appears that superconductivity runs in the family. Graphene is a single-atom-thin 2D material that can be produced by exfoliation from the same graphite that is found in pencil lead. The u.

The discovery could inform the design of practical superconducting devices.

When it comes to graphene.

Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.

Hard yet flexible, chitin builds insects’ exoskeletons, wings, and scales.

The AI-powered robot is named “Polly” and will pollinate truss tomato plants in Costa’s tomato glasshouse facilities in Guyra, New South Wales.

In its commercial application, Costa wrote on its website that these robotic pollinators will drive between the rows, detect flowers that are ripe for pollination utilizing artificial intelligence, and then emit air pulses to vibrate the flowers in a certain way that mimics buzz pollination that is carried out by bumblebees.

Compared to using insects, like bees, and the human laborers that are occasionally required to aid with the growth of particular crops, pollination robots could provide future farmers with a major advantage, which is to improve productivity.

This mismatch creates a child-care crisis between 3 and 5 p.m. that has parents scrambling for options.

Berkeley Lab scientists assess the technology landscape for developing a domestic source of lithium.

If you had a jar of marbles of many different colors but wanted only the green ones, how could you efficiently pick them out? What if it wasn’t marbles but a jar of glitter, and there was sand, glue, and mud mixed in? That begins to describe the complexity of the brine pumped out from beneath California’s Salton Sea as part of geothermal energy production.

For geothermal fields around the world, produced geothermal brine has been simply injected back underground, but now it’s become clear that the brines produced at the Salton Sea geothermal field contain an immense amount of lithium, a critical resource need for low-carbon transportation and energy storage. Demand for lithium is skyrocketing, as it is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. Currently there is very little lithium production in the U.S. and most lithium is imported; however, that may change in the near future.

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