Lifeboat Foundation

One rocket, two missions: Lunar landers built by US and Japanese companies are poised to “rideshare” to the moon, showcasing the private sector’s growing role in space exploration.

SpaceX is targeting a 1:11 am (0611 GMT) Wednesday liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with very favorable weather conditions forecast.

On board are two privately developed, uncrewed lunar landers: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and ispace’s Resilience from Japan, which will also deploy a micro rover.

To describe how matter works at infinitesimal scales, researchers designate collective behaviors with single concepts, like calling a group of birds flying in sync a “flock” or “murmuration.” Known as quasiparticles, the phenomena these concepts refer to could be the key to next-generation technologies.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers led by Shengxi Huang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, describe how one such type of quasiparticle—polarons—behaves in tellurene, a nanomaterial first synthesized in 2017 that is made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms and has properties useful in sensing, electronic, optical and energy devices.

“Tellurene exhibits dramatic changes in its electronic and optical properties when its thickness is reduced to a few nanometers compared to its bulk form,” said Kunyan Zhang, a Rice doctoral alumna who is a first author on the study. “Specifically, these changes alter how electricity flows and how the material vibrates, which we traced back to the transformation of polarons as tellurene becomes thinner.”

When sound waves reach the inner ear, neurons there pick up the vibrations and alert the brain. Encoded in their signals is a wealth of information that enables us to follow conversations, recognize familiar voices, appreciate music, and quickly locate a ringing phone or crying baby.

Neurons send signals by emitting spikes—brief changes in voltage that propagate along nerve fibers, also known as action potentials. Remarkably, auditory neurons can fire hundreds of spikes per second, and time their spikes with exquisite precision to match the oscillations of incoming sound waves.

With powerful new models of human hearing, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have determined that this precise timing is vital for some of the most important ways we make sense of auditory information, including recognizing voices and localizing sounds.

UCLA materials scientists have developed a compact cooling technology that can pump away heat continuously using layers of flexing thin films. The design is based on the electrocaloric effect, in which an electric field causes a temporary change in a material’s temperature.

In lab experiments, the researchers found that the prototype could lower ambient temperatures of its immediate surroundings by 16 degrees Fahrenheit continuously and up to 25 degrees at the source of the heat after about 30 seconds.

Detailed in a paper published in the journal Science, the approach could be incorporated into wearable cooling technology or portable cooling devices.

Back in the old days—the really old days—the task of designing materials was laborious. Investigators, over the course of 1,000-plus years, tried to make gold by combining things like lead, mercury, and sulfur, mixed in what they hoped would be just the right proportions. Even famous scientists like Tycho Brahe, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton tried their hands at the fruitless endeavor we call alchemy.

Materials science has, of course, come a long way. For the past 150 years, researchers have had the benefit of the periodic table of elements upon which to draw, which tells them that different elements have different properties, and one can’t magically transform into another. Moreover, in the past decade or so, machine learning tools have considerably boosted our capacity to determine the structure and physical properties of various molecules and substances.

New research by a group led by Ju Li—the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor of Nuclear Engineering at MIT and professor of materials science and engineering—offers the promise of a major leap in capabilities that can facilitate materials design. The results of their investigation appear in Nature Computational Science.

The operation and performance of quantum computers relies on the ability to realize and control entanglement between multiple qubits. Yet entanglement between many qubits is inherently susceptible to noise and imperfections in quantum gates.

In recent years, quantum physicists and engineers worldwide have thus been trying to develop more robust protocols to realize and control entanglement. To be most effective for real-world applications, these approaches should reliably support long-range entanglement, or in other words ensure that qubits remain entangled even when they are separated by large distances.

Researchers at IBM Quantum, University of Cologne and Harvard University set out to demonstrate one of these protocols in an experimental setting.

Enhanced Sensitivity and Wave-Structure Interaction in Nonsingular Flat-Band Lattices with Compact Localized States https://arxiv.org/html/2412.05610v1

A team of UConn College of Engineering (CoE) researchers have achieved a major milestone in the field of phononics with the first experimental demonstration of an all-flat phononic band structure (AFB). Phononics concerns the study of sound and heat control.

The breakthrough, detailed in an article just published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a new class of materials capable of uniquely controlling sound and vibrations by trapping energy with unprecedented intensity, offering exciting possibilities for potential applications in acoustics, vibration insulation, energy harvesting, and beyond.

Continue reading “All-flat phononic band structure controls sound and vibrations by trapping energy” »

Physicists have spent more than a century measuring and making sense of the strange ways that photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles interact at extremely small scales. Engineers have spent decades figuring out how to take advantage of these phenomena to create new technologies.

In one such phenomenon, called quantum entanglement, pairs of photons become interconnected in such a way that the state of one photon instantly changes to match the state of its paired photon, no matter how far apart they are.

Nearly 80 years ago, Albert Einstein referred to this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Today, entanglement is the subject of research programs across the world—and it’s becoming a favored way to implement the most fundamental form of quantum information, the qubit.

Quantum computing promises to solve complex problems exponentially faster than a classical computer, by using the principles of quantum mechanics to encode and manipulate information in quantum bits (qubits).

Qubits are the building blocks of a quantum computer. One challenge to scaling, however, is that qubits are highly sensitive to background noise and control imperfections, which introduce errors into the quantum operations and ultimately limit the complexity and duration of a quantum algorithm. To improve the situation, MIT researchers and researchers worldwide have continually focused on improving qubit performance.

In new work, using a superconducting qubit called fluxonium, MIT researchers in the Department of Physics, the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) developed two new control techniques to achieve a world-record single-qubit fidelity of 99.998%. This result complements then-MIT researcher Leon Ding’s demonstration last year of a 99.92% two-qubit gate fidelity.