Longtime readers know that I’ve made a bit of an effort to help people understand, and perhaps even grow to respect, the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI). I’ve even written papers about it. It’s a controversial idea and far from firmly established, but it’s a serious one, and deserves serious discussion.
Tesla’s Megapack, with its ability to store and supply large amounts of renewable energy, has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry and contribute to a more sustainable future.
Questions to inspire discussion.
Mechanical systems are highly suitable for realizing applications such as quantum information processing, quantum sensing and bosonic quantum simulation. The effective use of these systems for these applications, however, relies on the ability to manipulate them in unique ways, specifically by ‘squeezing’ their states and introducing nonlinear effects in the quantum regime.
A research team at ETH Zurich led by Dr. Matteo Fadel recently introduced a new approach to realize quantum squeezing in a nonlinear mechanical oscillator. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could have interesting implications for the development of quantum metrology and sensing technologies.
“Initially, our goal was to prepare a mechanical squeezed state, namely a quantum state of motion with reduced quantum fluctuations along one phase-space direction,” Fadel told Phys.org. “Such states are important for quantum sensing and quantum simulation applications. They are one of the gates in the universal gate set for quantum computing with continuous-variable systems—meaning mechanical degrees of freedom, electromagnetic fields, etc., as opposed to qubits that are discrete-variable systems.”
UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.
With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.
“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.
Researchers have designed a copper nanocluster-based catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into useful methane.
Researchers from Germany, Italy, and the UK have achieved a major advance in the development of materials suitable for on-chip energy harvesting. By composing an alloy made of silicon, germanium and tin, they were able to create a thermoelectric material, promising to transform the waste heat of computer processors back into electricity.
With all elements coming from the 4th main group of the periodic table, these new semiconductor alloy can be easily integrated into the CMOS process of chip production. The research findings are published in ACS Applied Energy Materials.
The increasing use of electronic devices in all aspects of our lives is driving up energy consumption. Most of this energy is dissipated into the environment in the form of heat.
