Quasicrystal found in ‘fossilized lightning’

24 Jan 2023

Bolt from the blue Cross-section of a fulgurite sample found in Nebraska that shows melted conductor metal from a downed powerline surrounded by fused sand. (Courtesy: Luca Bindi et al.)

A quasicrystal that was likely formed by a strong electrical discharge through a sand dune has been found by researchers based in the US and Italy. The team, led by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, hopes that their discovery could lead to the development of new techniques for creating artificial quasicrystals and help scientists find other naturally-occurring samples.

 

Commercializing quantum technologies: the risks and opportunities

19 May 2023 Hamish Johnston

Optimal use: quantum computers could help with optimization in insurance and finance, but their use also brings new and unfamiliar risks that must be mitigated. (Courtesy: iStock)

This week, the Economist hosted the “Commercialising Quantum Global” conference in the UK and I was very pleased to attend in person on Wednesday. The meeting was held in the heart of the City of London, one of the world’s great financial centres. This was no coincidence, because this was not a conference primarily about science, or even technology – business was at the centre of most discussions.

 

Environmental groups sue US aviation watchdog following the failed launch of SpaceX’s Starship craft

11 May 2023

Collateral damage: the maiden launch of SpaceX’s Starship rocket on 20 April lasted almost four minutes before it exploded (courtesy: SpaceX via Twitter)

Five environmental and cultural-heritage groups are suing the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) following the maiden launch of SpaceX’s Starship. The launch, which took place on 20 April in Boca Chica, Texas, caused significant damage to the launchpad and the surrounding area. The groups say that by permitting take-off without a comprehensive environmental review, the FAA violated the US National Environmental Policy Act.

 

India gives green light to gravitational-wave observatory

24 Apr 2023

New views: the LIGO-India observatory will be an identical copy of the two US advanced LIGO observatories located in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana (pictured) (courtesy: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab)

The Indian government has given the go-ahead for a gravitational-wave detector to be built in the country. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory – India (LIGO-India) is expected to be operational by 2030 and will be located in Aundh in the state of Maharashtra. It will cost an estimated $3.1bn (INR 26bn) to build.

 

Particle physicists get AI help with beam dynamics

23 May 2023

Shaping up: A new machine learning algorithm helps physicists reconstruct the shapes of particle accelerator beams from tiny amounts of training data. (Courtesy: Greg Steward/SLAC National Accelerator Lab)

Researchers in the US have developed a machine learning algorithm that accurately reconstructs the shapes of particle accelerator beams from tiny amounts of training data. The new algorithm should make it easier to understand the results of accelerator experiments and could lead to breakthroughs in interpreting them, according to team leader Ryan Roussel of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

 

Entangled light source is fully on-chip

03 May 2023

Cluster creation: artistic impression of a state containing multiple entangled photons. (Courtesy: iStock/agsandrew)

Pairs of entangled photons are a key ingredient of photonic quantum computers, quantum key distribution systems, and many quantum networking designs. Producing entangled photons on demand generally requires bulky lasers and prolonged alignment procedures – and this limits the commercial viability of these technologies. Now, a team of researchers in Germany and the Netherlands have used a new architecture to combine several integrated photonic technologies into one device. The result is a complete entangled photon source on a chip that is about the size of a one euro coin.

 

New type of quasiparticle emerges to tame quantum computing errors

22 May 2023

Topological manipulations: A graphic representing non-Abelian braiding of graph vertices in a superconducting quantum processor. (Courtesy: Google Quantum AI)

Errors are the Achilles’ heel of quantum computation, cropping up at random and threatening to ruin calculations. But they might, in principle, be tamed by encoding quantum information in a type of quasiparticle called a non-Abelian anyon. Evidence that such quasiparticles may exist has now been reported independently by teams at Google, Microsoft, the quantum-computing firm Quantinuum, and Zhejiang University in China.

 

Private Japanese lunar craft Hakuto-R crashes on landing

26 Apr 2023 Michael Banks

Hard times: ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 craft aimed to be the first by a private firm to land on the Moon (courtesy: ispace)

The Japanese firm ispace has announced that its Hakuto-R Mission 1 craft has failed in its attempt to land on the Moon. In a statement, the firm said ispace engineers would now carry out a detailed analysis of the telemetry data to find the cause of the crash. If the mission had succeeded, ispace would have become the first private firm to land a craft on the lunar surface.

 

Gravitational lensing of supernova yields new value for Hubble constant

23 May 2023

Early arrivals: the first four images of the gravitationally lensed supernova are shown in yellow. (Courtesy: NASA/ESA/JHU/UCLA/UC Berkeley/STScI)

A study of how light from a distant supernova was gravitationally lensed as it travelled to Earth has been used to calculate a new value for the Hubble constant – an important parameter that describes the expansion of the universe. While this latest result has not surprised astronomers, similar observations in the future could help us understand why different techniques have so far yielded very different values for the Hubble constant.

 

Photonic time crystal amplifies microwaves

13 May 2023

Time-varying metamaterial: illustration of how a 2D photonic time crystal can amplify light waves. (Courtesy: Xuchen Wang/Aalto University)

A major barrier to creating photonic time crystals in the lab has been overcome by a team of researchers in Finland, Germany and the US. Sergei Tretyakov at Aalto University and colleagues have shown how the time varying properties of these exotic materials can be realized far more easily in 2D than in 3D.

 

Mystery of bright-white shrimp solved

16 May 2023

White stripes: The brilliant white colouring seen on the Pacific cleaner shrimp. (Courtesy: PilarMeca, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18884803)

Researchers in Israel have uncovered the unique optical nanostructure that gives an ocean-going scavenger its brilliant white colouring. Using a range of imaging techniques, a team led by Benjamin Palmer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, showed that spherical particles in Pacific cleaner shrimp scatter incoming light in all directions, while avoiding any overlap in the scattering patterns they produce. The discovery could lead to new bio-inspired white pigments.

 

Entangled ions set long-distance record

12 May 2023 Ali Lezeik

One of the nodes: An ion trap between the two mirrors forming the optical cavity. (Courtesy: Northup lab)

Using light and optical fibres to send information from point A to B is today a standard practice, but what if we could skip the “sending and carrying” steps entirely and simply read information instantaneously? Thanks to quantum entanglement, this idea is no longer a work of fiction, but a subject of ongoing research. By entangling two quantum particles such as ions, scientists can put them into a fragile joint state where measuring one particle gives information about the other in ways that that would be impossible classically.

 

New horizons beckon for UK quantum computing

12 May 2023 Sponsored by National Quantum Computing Centre

Quantum collaboration: Elham Kashefi (left), director of the new Quantum Software Lab and chief scientist of the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), listens to a talk at the lab's launch event with Michael Cuthbert, the NQCC's director. Also in the picture are (foreground) Sir Peter Knight of Imperial College London and (background) Iain Gordon, head of the university's College of Science and Engineering. (Courtesy: NQCC)

 

Reactor antineutrinos detected in pure water in an experimental first

28 Mar 2023

Reactor reactions: the SNO+ detector has seen antineutrinos from distant reactors when it was filled with pure water. (Courtesy: SNO+)

For the first time, pure water has been used to detect low-energy antineutrinos produced by nuclear reactors. The work was done by the international SNO+ collaboration and could lead to safe and affordable new ways to monitor nuclear reactors from a distance.

 

Stellarator plasma oscillations resemble struggle between predator and prey

22 Mar 2022

Predator and prey: The upper graph shows the predator-prey relationship between the magnetic island and the bootstrap current. The bottom diagrams show the situation in the Large Helical Device when the current is at its maximum (left) and minimum values. (Courtesy: National Institute for Fusion Science)

If fusion reactors are ever to provide energy commercially, they will have to operate non-stop for extended periods of time – something they are not currently able to do. Researchers in Japan report having taken a step in that direction after discovering a new kind of oscillation triggered by magnetic fields used to confine a reactor’s ultra-hot plasma. By comparing that oscillation with the fluctuating populations of predators and prey sometimes seen in nature, they reckon it should be possible to remove the variation and stably isolate the plasma.

 

Germany reveals €3bn plan to build a quantum computer by 2026

10 May 2023

The German quantum computer, to be built by 2026, will have a capacity of at least 100 qubits (Courtesy: iStock/Devrimb)

The German government says it will spend €3bn over the next three years to build a universal quantum computer. The project is part of a new initiative to make Germany competitive with countries that have already built or are taking steps to construct such a device. It is hoped the cash will boost the German economy and place the country at the top of quantum developments in the European Union.

 

Two-in-one gel supresses aggressive brain tumours

11 May 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Hybrid therapy: the chemotherapy and immunotherapy mixture transforms into a gel. (Courtesy: Johns Hopkins University)

A new gel made by combining molecules routinely employed in chemotherapy and immunotherapy could help treat aggressive brain tumours known as glioblastomas, according to new work by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US. The gel can reach areas that surgery might miss and it also appears to trigger an immune response that could help supress the formation of a future tumour.

 

Towards combined hypoxia imaging and adaptive radiotherapy

28 Apr 2023

Tumour oxygenation measurements Example patient scans showing an anatomical reference MR image (left column), and ΔR1 maps obtained from two pre-treatment baseline scans (centre and right columns) recorded roughly six days apart. (Courtesy: CC BY 4.0/Radiother. Oncol. 10.1016/j.radonc.2023.109592)

A rapidly growing tumour can’t deliver oxygen to all its regions. The resulting oxygen-starved tumour regions, however, are difficult to treat with radiation therapy, a technique that relies on free radicals produced in the presence of oxygen to damage DNA in cancer cells.

 

Classic telescope design inspires new microscope objective

27 Apr 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Classic design: the Schmidt objective produces detailed images of neurons in a mouse brain. (Courtesy: Anna Maria Reuss (USZ) & Fabian Voigt (UZH))

Researchers in Switzerland have built what they claim is the simplest microscope objective ever constructed. The device, which comprises just two optical components, is based on the classic Schmidt telescope design and works in a variety of immersion liquids as well as air. Because the new objective has a larger field of view and working distance than standard devices, the researchers say it could be used to image large organs and even whole organisms.

 

Ultrathin e-tattoo provides continuous heart monitoring

10 May 2023 Tami Freeman

Mobile cardiac monitor Sarnab Bhattcharya, Nanshu Lu and colleagues are developing an ultrathin and stretchable chest e-tattoo that could detect early signs of heart disease. (Courtesy: The University of Texas at Austin)

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Continuous cardiac monitoring could allow earlier detection of heart disease, enabling timely intervention to prevent serious cardiac complications. Traditional monitoring devices, however, are designed for clinical settings and are too heavy and power-hungry for long-term measurements of people on the move.

Researchers develop the missing component in robotic textiles

04 Apr 2023 Anna Demming

Wearable fluidic systems The fibre pump can be seamlessly woven into textiles. (Courtesy: © LMTS EPFL)

For years the snag with soft robotics has been that a lot of it requires some kind of pump that, until now, has only been available in more conventional un­-wearable forms. Sensors, actuators, as well as energy storage and generation devices, have all been developed in the form of soft fibres that can be woven seamlessly into clothing. However, the soft pumps that have been developed lack the fluidic power to make them really useful, and have not been made as fibres.

 

Water-based switch outpaces semiconductor devices

11 Jan 2023

On target Water is fanned out through a specially developed nozzle and then a laser pulse is passed through it to create a switch. (Courtesy: Adrian Buchmann)

A laser-controlled water-based switch that operates twice as fast as existing semiconductor switches has been developed by a trio of physicists in Germany. Adrian Buchmann, Claudius Hoberg, Fabio Novelli at Ruhr University Bochum used an ultrashort laser pulse to create a temporary metal-like state in a jet of liquid water. This altered the transmission of terahertz pulses over timescales of just tens of femtoseconds.

Machine-learning innovation in RayStation: prioritizing speed, automation, efficiency

11 May 2023 Sponsored by RaySearch Laboratories

RaySearch Laboratories and its clinical customers are leveraging advances in machine learning to reimagine the radiotherapy workflow

Data-driven oncology: a growing number of clinical customers are exploiting RayStation’s deep-learning capabilities for the automated segmentation of diverse disease indications. (Courtesy: RaySearch Laboratories)

Machine-learning technologies are unleashing a wave of data-driven innovation and transformation in radiation oncology, yielding step-function improvements in automation, workflow efficiency and consistency of treatment – both for individual clinics and across multicentre healthcare systems.

 

Portable imaging system targets eye diseases, pondering the mysteries of dark matter

11 May 2023 Hamish Johnston

This episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast features interviews with the chief executive of a UK-based medical start-up and the new president of the Australian Institute of Physics.

First up is Alasdair Price of the medical-imaging company Siloton, which is using photonic integrated circuits to develop a portable imaging system that can monitor the progression of eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration.

 

Giant tunnelling magnetoresistance appears in an antiferromagnet

10 May 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Schematic of the device: two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) magnetic materials are particularly promising for spintronic devices. (Courtesy: G Yu)

Researchers in China have observed giant tunnelling magnetoresistance (TMR) in a magnetic tunnel junction made from the antiferromagnet CrSBr. When cooled to a temperature of 5 K, the new structure exhibited a magnetoresistance of 47,000% – higher than commercial magnetic tunnel junctions – and it retained 50% of this TMR at 130 K, which is well above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. According to its developers, the structure can be manufactured in a way that is compatible with the magnetron sputtering process used to make conventional spintronics devices.

 

Lithium-ion batteries break energy density record

21 Apr 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Technology advances: the energy density of lithium-ion batteries has increased from 80 Wh/kg to around 300 Wh/kg since the beginning of the 1990s. (Courtesy: B Wang)

Researchers have succeeded in making rechargeable pouch-type lithium batteries with a record-breaking energy density of over 700 Wh/kg. The new design comprises a high-capacity lithium-rich manganese-based cathode and a thin lithium metal anode with high specific energy. If developed further, the device could find use in applications such as electric aviation, which requires much higher energy density batteries than those available today.

Lithium-ion batteries are a key technology for helping to reach climate neutrality goals. They are increasingly being used to power electric vehicles and as the principal components of domestic devices that store energy generated from renewable sources.

 

Scanning probe with a twist observes electron’s wavelike behaviour

03 Mar 2023 Anna Demming

How it works: illustration of the quantum twisting microscope in action. Electrons tunnel from the probe (inverted pyramid at the top) to the sample (bottom) in several places at once (green vertical lines), in a quantum coherent manner. (Courtesy: Weizmann Institute of Science)

When the scanning tunnelling microscope made its debut in the 1980s, the result was an explosion in nanotechnology and quantum-device research. Since then, other types of scanning probe microscopes have been developed and together they have helped researchers flesh out theories of electron transport. But these techniques probe electrons at a single point, thereby observing them as particles and only seeing their wave nature indirectly. Now, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have built a new scanning probe – the quantum twisting microscope – that detects the quantum wave characteristics of electrons directly.

 

Thinner antiferroelectrics become ferroelectric

06 Mar 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Changing phase: antiferroelectric-to-ferroelectric phase transition. (Courtesy: Advanced Materials CC BY 4.0)

Reduced beyond a certain size, antiferroelectric materials become ferroelectric. This new result, from researchers in the US and France, shows that size reduction could be used to turn on unexpected properties in oxide materials and indeed a range of other technologically important systems.

Antiferroelectric materials consist of regularly repeating units, each of which has an electric dipole – a positive charge paired with a negative one. These dipoles alternate through the crystalline structure of the material and such regular spacing means that antiferroelectrics have zero net polarization on the macroscale.

 

Speeded-up Brillouin microscopy sheds light on embryo development

04 May 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Brillouin Microscopy in the Prevedel Lab: line-scanning Brillouin microscopy can be used to non-invasively study developing embryos in three dimensions and across time, providing novel biological insights. (Courtesy: Joana Gomes Campos de Carvalho/EMBL)

A new microscopy technique can image the mechanical properties of developing embryos at unprecedented speed while capturing spatial details on the scale of microns. The technique, which was developed by Robert Prevedel and colleagues at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany, does not damage delicate biological cells or tissues and could be used in several areas of research, including biomedicine, and cell and development biology.

 

Forest of cylindrical obstacles’ slows avalanche flow

05 May 2023 Isabelle Dumé

Downslope flow: the researchers in the lab with their experiment. (Courtesy: Université Paris-Saclay/FAST)

The flow rate of avalanches could be reduced by up to two-thirds by covering vulnerable slopes with trees planted every three metres. This is the conclusion of researchers in France, who used experiments and a new theoretical model of millimetre-sized grains flowing down a sloping “forest of cylindrical obstacles” to gain insights into damaging snow slides.

 

Imperfection is not a problem for artificial synapses

02 May 2023

Imperfect system: artist’s impression of neurons and synapses in the brain. (Courtesy: iStock/Henrik5000)

Using a strategy that mimics the encoding of information in our brains, a trio of researchers in China has proposed a new platform for artificial intelligence (AI) that could be far more robust than existing architectures. The approach, which has yet to be implemented in the lab, exploits the inevitable non-uniformity of artificial neurons that are a result of defects in real magnetic materials.