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Researchers at Osaka City University use quantum superposition states and Bayesian inference to create a quantum algorithm, easily executable on quantum computers, that accurately and directly calculates energy differences between the electronic ground and excited spin states of molecular systems in polynomial time.

Understanding how the natural world works enables us to mimic it for the benefit of humankind. Think of how much we rely on batteries. At the core is understanding molecular structures and the behavior of electrons within them. Calculating the energy differences between a molecule’s electronic ground and excited spin states helps us understand how to better use that molecule in a variety of chemical, biomedical and industrial applications. We have made much progress in molecules with closed-shell systems, in which electrons are paired up and stable. Open-shell systems, on the other hand, are less stable and their underlying electronic behavior is complex, and thus more difficult to understand. They have unpaired electrons in their ground state, which cause their energy to vary due to the intrinsic nature of electron spins, and makes measurements difficult, especially as the molecules increase in size and complexity.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.

Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure of the material that protects the electrons from doing so. These anomalous electron transport channels, protected by symmetry and topology, don’t normally occur in conventional metals such as copper. After decades of being described only in the context of theoretical physics, there is growing interest in fabricating, exploring, refining, and controlling their topologically protected electronic properties for device applications. For example, wide-scale adoption of quantum computing requires building devices in which fragile quantum states are protected from impurities and noisy environments. One approach to achieve this is through the development of topological quantum computation, in which qubits are based on “symmetry-protected” dissipationless electric currents that are immune to noise.

“Light-induced lattice twisting, or a phononic switch, can control the crystal inversion symmetry and photogenerate giant electric current with very small resistance,” said Jigang Wang, senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and professor of physics at Iowa State University. “This new control principle does not require static electric or magnetic fields, and has much faster speeds and lower energy cost.”

The mission launched from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, with the drop zone taking place over the Pacific Ocean — and made LauncherOne the first liquid-fuelled and horizontally launched spacecraft to ever reach orbit.

The small satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 500km, prompting Virgin Orbit’s chief executive Dan Hart to declare: “A new gateway to space has just sprung open.”

Circa 2008

December 122008 Massachusetts-based FloDesign has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional wind turbines. The company’s design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. Typically, as wind approaches a turbine, almost half of the air is forced around the blades rather than through them, and the energy in that deflected wind is lost. At best, traditional wind turbines capture only 59.3 percent of the energy in wind, a value called the Betz limit.

Jet engine wind turbine

Continue reading “High efficiency wind turbine based on jet engine technology” »

Direct observation of an ion moving through a Bose-Einstein condensate identifies the effect of ion-atom collisions on charge transport in an ultracold gas.

When you expose mobile electrical charges in a medium to an electrical field, current flows. The charges are accelerated by the field, but collisions within the medium give rise to a kind of friction effect, which limits the velocity of the charges and thus the current. This universal concept, called diffusive transport, describes a large range of media, such as metallic conductors, electrolytic solutions, and gaseous plasmas. But in a quantum system, such as a superconductor or a superfluid, other collective effects can influence the transport through the medium. Now, a group led by Florian Meinert and Tilman Pfau both of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, have carried out charge-transport experiments with a single ion traversing a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), which is a quantum gas of cold neutral atoms [1]. The precise tracking of the ion shows that the transport is diffusive and reveals the character of the ion-atom collisions.

Synthetic cannabidiol, better known as CBD, has been shown for the first time to kill the bacteria responsible for gonorrhea, meningitis and legionnaires disease.

The research collaboration between The University of Queensland and Botanix Pharmaceuticals Limited could lead to the first new class of antibiotics for resistant bacteria in 60 years.

Continue reading “Research establishes antibiotic potential for cannabis molecule” »

Taiwan contract chip maker TSMC will begin ‘risk production’ of its 3-nanometre process this year, a technology advance that will deliver higher performance and longer battery life for 5G smartphones and other high-end electronics products.

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson all want to send private citizens to space. Their respective companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are dedicated to making space travel and space tourism more accessible.

Narrator: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are in a modern space race. Similar to when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to get astronauts on the moon, these billionaire-run companies are racing to bring people like you and me to space. But how will they do it?

Let’s start with Blue Origin, the passion project of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin’s focus is on commercial space flight, or space tourism. It plans to shoot a booster rocket with an attached passenger capsule to 60 miles above the surface into sub-orbital space. At the top of the rocket’s arch, the capsule will detach, and for about four minutes, passengers will experience weightlessness. They’ll be allowed to unbuckle their seat belts and float around the cabin, looking out the window at the curvature of the Earth. The capsule will then start to fall back into the atmosphere, and parachutes will deploy to bring it down slowly. The whole trip only lasts about 11 minutes. A ticket on Blue Origin’s New Shepard will likely cost more than $200000. That’s over $18000 a minute. Blue Origin has tested the New Shepard rocket nine times, and the company still hopes to send civilians into space in 2018.

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