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More than $54 billion in state funding and billions more from the federal government will be poured into projects and programs.

Japanese and U.S. physicists have used atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space to open a portal to an unexplored realm of quantum magnetism.

“Unless an alien civilization is doing experiments like these right now, anytime this experiment is running at Kyoto University it is making the coldest fermions in the universe,” said Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard, corresponding theory author of a study published today in Nature Physics. “Fermions are not rare particles. They include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of.”

A Kyoto team led by study author Yoshiro Takahashi used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the unattainable temperature where all motion stops. That’s about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space, which is still warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang.

Atoms in magnetic materials are organized into regions called magnetic domains. Within each domain, the electrons have the same magnetic orientation. This means their spins point in the same direction. “Walls” separate the magnetic domains. One type of wall has spin rotations that are left-or right-handed, known as having chirality. When subjected to a magnetic field, chiral domain walls approach one another, shrinking the magnetic domains.

Researchers have developed a magnetic material whose thickness determines whether chiral domain walls have the same or alternating handedness. In the latter case, applying a magnetic field leads to annihilation of colliding domain walls. The researchers combined neutron scattering and electron microscopy to characterize these internal, microscopic features, leading to better understanding of the magnetic behavior.

An emerging field of technology called spintronics involves processing and storing information by harnessing an electron’s spin instead of its charge. The ability to control this fundamental property could unlock new possibilities for developing electronic devices. Compared to current technology, these devices could store more information in less space and operate at higher speeds with less energy consumption.

Researchers have discovered a new method for correcting errors in the calculations of quantum computers, potentially clearing a major obstacle to a powerful new realm of computing.

In conventional computers, fixing errors is a well-developed field. Every cellphone requires checks and fixes to send and receive data over messy airwaves. Quantum computers offer enormous potential to solve certain complex problems that are impossible for conventional computers, but this power depends on harnessing extremely fleeting behaviors of subatomic particles. These computing behaviors are so ephemeral that even looking in on them to check for errors can cause the whole system to collapse.

In a paper outlining a new theory for error correction, published Aug. 9 in Nature Communications, an interdisciplinary team led by Jeff Thompson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton, and collaborators Yue Wu and Shruti Puri at Yale University and Shimon Kolkowitz at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, showed that they could dramatically improve a quantum computer’s tolerance for faults, and reduce the amount of redundant information needed to isolate and fix errors. The new technique increases the acceptable error rate four-fold, from 1% to 4%, which is practical for quantum computers currently in development.

Planets can create nuclear power on their own, naturally, without any intelligence or technology. Earth already did: 1.7 billion years ago.

Composite particles with submicron sizes can be produced by irradiating a suspension of nanoparticles with a laser beam. Violent physical and chemical processes take place during irradiation, many of which have been poorly understood to date. Recently completed experiments, carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, have shed new light on some of these puzzles.

When a laser beam strikes agglomerates of nanoparticles suspended in a colloid, events occur that are as dramatic as they are useful. The tremendous increase in temperature leads to the melting together of nanoparticles into a composite particle. A thin layer of liquid next to the heated material rapidly transforms into vapor, and whole sequences of chemical reactions take place under physical conditions that change in fractions of a second. Using this method, called laser melting, scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow not only produced new nanocomposites, but also described some of the poorly understood processes responsible for their formation.

“The laser melting process itself, consisting of irradiating particles of material in suspension with unfocused laser light, has been known for years. It is mainly used for the production of single component materials. We, as one of only two research teams in the world, are trying to use this technique to produce composite submicron particles. In this area, the field is still in its infancy, there are still many unknowns, hence our joy that some puzzles that perplexed us have just been unraveled,” says Dr. Żaneta Świątkowska-Warkocka, a professor at IFJ PAN, the co-author of a scientific article just published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Two of America’s top chipmakers have been ordered to stop selling some of their technology to China that can be used for artificial intelligence.

Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) said Wednesday that they had been told by the US government to halt exports of certain high-performance chips to the world’s second largest economy.

In a regulatory filing, Nvidia said that it had been told by US officials that the requirement was due to a potential risk of the products being used by, or diverted to, a “military end user.”

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(PhysOrg.com) — Sometimes total electrical isolation is a good thing — and that’s the idea behind a power-over-fiber (PoF) communications cable being developed by engineers at Sandia National Laboratories.

It’s common to isolate communications between systems or devices by using fiber optic cables, said Steve Sanderson of Sandia’s mobility analysis and technical assessment division. But when power also is required, sending it down a copper wire can at times be a safety issue, and substituting it with battery power may not be suitable or practical, he said.

Continue reading “Developing power-over-fiber communications cable: When total isolation is a good thing” »