Lifeboat Foundation

In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT—the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a feature never seen before.

A research team from Skoltech and Bergische Universität Wuppertal in Germany has created a universal NOR logical element (from NOT—a negation operator and OR—a disjunction operator).

Researchers at QuTech developed somersaulting spin qubits for universal quantum logic. This achievement may enable efficient control of large semiconductor qubit arrays. The research group published their demonstration of hopping spins in Nature Communications and their work on somersaulting spins in Science.

In 2021, the same collaborators developed the technology that acts as an active spin filter made of two successive layers of material, called chiral hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskites. Chirality describes a molecule’s symmetry, where its mirror image cannot be superimposed on itself. Human hands are the classic example; hold yours out, palms facing away. The right and left hands are arranged as mirrors of one another—you can flip your right hand 180° to match the silhouette, but now the right palm is facing you while the left palm faces away. They’re not the same.

Some molecules, such as DNA, sugar and layers of chiral hybrid organic-halide perovskites, have their atoms arranged in chiral symmetry. The filter works by using a “left-handed” oriented chiral layer to allow electrons with “up” spins to pass, but block electrons with “down” spins, and vice versa. At the time, the scientists claimed the discovery could be used to transform conventional optoelectronics into spintronic devices simply by incorporating the chiral spin filter. The new study did just that.

“We took an LED from the shelf. We removed one electrode and put the spin filter material and another regular electrode. And voila! The light was highly circularly polarized,” said Vardeny.

Over the past decades, computer scientists have developed various computing tools that could help to solve challenges in quantum physics. These include large-scale deep neural networks that can be trained to predict the ground states of quantum systems. This method is now referred to as neural quantum states (NQSs).

During the hot summer of 2020, confined to his Pasadena home during the COVID-19 pandemic, National Medal of Science-winning applied physicist Amnon Yariv took frequent and long showers to cool off. A surprising result, to go with his record-breaking water bill, was a proposal and theoretical model for a new class of vibrations that can convert a constant force, such as wind or water, to a mechanical oscillation.

In a paper in Physical Review Letters scientists from the department Living Matter Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) propose a mechanism on how energy barriers in complex systems can be overcome. These findings can help to engineer molecular machines and to understand the self-organization of active matter.

Using two optically-trapped glass nanoparticles, researchers observed a novel collective Non-Hermitian and non-linear dynamic driven by non-reciprocal interactions. This contribution expands traditional optical levitation with tweezer arrays by incorporating non-conservative interactions.

Topological insulators, capable of transmitting electricity without loss, may function in fractional dimensions such as 1.58. This breakthrough, combined with room-temperature operability, paves the way for advancements in quantum computing and energy efficiency through fractal structures.

What if we could find a way to make electric currents flow, without energy loss? A promising approach for this involves using materials known as topological insulators. They are known to exist in one (wire), two (sheet) and three (cube) dimensions; all with different possible applications in electronic devices. Theoretical physicists at Utrecht University, together with experimentalists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, have discovered that topological insulators may also exist at 1.58 dimensions, and that these could be used for energy-efficient information processing. Their study was published recently in Nature Physics.

Classical bits, the units of computer operation, are based on electric currents: electrons running means 1, no electrons running means 0. With a combination of 0s and 1s, one can build all the devices that you use in your daily life, from cellphones to computers. However, while running, these electrons meet defects and impurities in the material, and lose energy. This is what happens when your device gets warm: the energy is converted into heat, and so your battery is drained faster.