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Category: quantum physics

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and tested a new #Interferometer

January 3, 2019 — By analyzing a pattern formed by the intersection of two beams of light, researchers can capture elusive details regarding the behavior of mysterious phenomena such as gravitational waves. Creating and precisely measuring these interference patterns would not be possible without instruments called interferometers.

For over three decades, scientists have attempted to improve the sensitivity of interferometers to better detect how the number of photons—particles that make up visible light and other forms of electromagnetic energy—leads to changes in light phases. Attempts to achieve this goal are often hampered by optical loss and noise, both of which can decrease the accuracy of interferometer measurements.

But now a team of researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and tested a new interferometer to study the factors that contribute to these conditions, and they have devised solutions to overcome them. Their findings were published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, which promoted their paper to Editors’ Pick status. The editors award this distinction to noteworthy publications compiled in an exclusive list.

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ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 4, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty will deliver the opening keynote at CES 2019 on Tuesday, Jan. 8. CES is the largest and one of the most influential technology events in the world.

Rometty will show how technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain and cloud are reshaping the world of business, and, in turn, our daily lives. She also will talk about what’s coming next in these pioneering technologies – and how new data will revolutionize how we live, work and play. Rometty shares perspective on the future of technology in the Consumer Technology Association magazine It Is Innovation (i3) CES edition: https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/manifest/i3_20190102

Rometty will be joined onstage by Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines; Charles Redfield, executive vice president of Food for Walmart; and Vijay Swarup, vice president of R&D for ExxonMobil.

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After developing a method to control exciton flows at room temperature, EPFL scientists have discovered new properties of these quasiparticles that can lead to more energy-efficient electronic devices.

They were the first to control flows at . And now, the team of scientists from EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has taken their technology one step further. They have found a way to control some of the properties of excitons and change the polarization of the light they generate. This can lead to a new generation of electronic devices with transistors that undergo less energy loss and heat dissipation. The scientists’ discovery forms part of a new field of research called valleytronics and has just been published in Nature Photonics.

Excitons are created when an electron absorbs light and moves into a higher energy level, or “energy band” as they are called in solid quantum physics. This excited electron leaves behind an “electron hole” in its previous band. And because the electron has a and the hole a positive charge, the two are bound together by an electrostatic force called a Coulomb force. It’s this electron-electron hole pair that is referred to as an exciton.

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Within days of each other back in 1998, two teams published the results of the first real-world quantum computations. But the first quantum computers weren’t computers at all. They were biochemistry equipment, relying on the same science as MRI machines.

You might think of quantum computing as a hyped-up race between computer companies to build a powerful processing device that will make more lifelike AI, revolutionize medicine, and crack the encryption that protects our data. And indeed, the prototype quantum computers of the late 1990s indirectly led to the quantum computers built by Google and IBM. But that’s not how it all began—it started with physicists tinkering with mathematics and biochemistry equipment for curiosity’s sake.

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Rice University physicists have created the world’s first laser-cooled neutral plasma, completing a 20-year quest that sets the stage for simulators that re-create exotic states of matter found inside Jupiter and white dwarf stars.

The findings are detailed this week in the journal Science and involve new techniques for cooling clouds of rapidly expanding to temperatures about 50 times colder than deep space.

“We don’t know the practical payoff yet, but every time physicists have laser cooled a new kind of thing, it has opened a whole world of possibilities,” said lead scientist Tom Killian, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “Nobody predicted that laser cooling atoms and ions would lead to the world’s most accurate clocks or breakthroughs in quantum computing. We do this because it’s a frontier.”

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Dan Shechtman has the rare honour of possessing a Nobel Prize for ‘nonsense’.

It’s been nearly four decades since he set out to convince the chemist community of a discovery most considered impossible – a material called a quasicrystal. Now we have just observed a brand new variety of these once ‘impossible’ materials for the first time, one based on a single unit.

Chemists from Brown University have described the successful creation of a self-constructing lattice structure based on a strangely shaped quantum dot.

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