Lifeboat Foundation

There are stark differences between metals, through which electrons flow freely, and electrical insulators, in which electrons are essentially immobile. And despite the obvious difficulties in finding a way to switch back and forth from a metal to an insulator within one material, physicists are trying to figure out how.

“Say you want to put billions of circuit elements on a tiny chip and then control, at that microscopic scale, whether just one of the elements is metallic or insulating in a controlled fashion,” said Debanjan Chowdhury, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It would be remarkable if you could control the microscopic device at the flick of a switch.”

Digging into recent past experimental results to try to reconcile experiment and theory, Chowdhury and doctoral candidate Sunghoon Kim found that even a tiny amount of imperfection, inherent in any real-life material, plays a key role in revealing the universal physics associated with the experimental metal-to-insulator transition (Physical Review Letters, “Continuous Mott Transition in Moiré Semiconductors: Role of Long-Wavelength Inhomogeneities”). Understanding the physics behind this mysterious phase transition could lead to new complex microscopic circuits, superconductors and exotic insulators that could find use in quantum computing.

Dramatic advances in quantum computing, smartphones that only need to be charged once a month, trains that levitate and move at superfast speeds. Technological leaps like these could revolutionize society, but they remain largely out of reach as long as superconductivity—the flow of electricity without resistance or energy waste—isn’t fully understood.

One of the major limitations for real-world applications of this technology is that the materials that make superconducting possible typically need to be at extremely cold temperatures to reach that level of electrical efficiency. To get around this limit, researchers need to build a clear picture of what different superconducting materials look like at the atomic scale as they transition through different states of matter to become superconductors.

Scholars in a Brown University lab, working with an international team of scientists, have moved a small step closer to cracking this mystery for a recently discovered family of superconducting Kagome metals. In a new study, they used an innovative new strategy combining nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and a quantum modeling theory to describe the microscopic structure of this superconductor at 103 degrees Kelvin, which is equivalent to about 275 degrees below 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Died: 13 October 1987, Seattle, WA, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

Prize motivation: “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect”

As fantastic as this may seem this is not an impossible occurrence.

Before Einstein, time travel was just a story, but his calculations led us into the quantum world and gave us a more complicated picture of time. Kurt Godel found that Einstein’s equations made it possible to go back in time. What’s up? None of the ideas about how to go back in time were ever physically possible.

Before sending a particle back in time, scientists from ETH Zurich, Argonne National Laboratory, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology asked, Why stick to physical grounds?

Continue reading “Scientists Successfully Sent A Particle Back in Time Using A Quantum Computer” »

Space “cubically” with shapes that act like spheres? A proof at the intersection of geometry and theoretical computer science says yes.

A team of Stanford scientists claims to have tested a new brain-computer interface (BCI) that can decode speech at up to 62 words per minute, improving the previous record by 3.4 times.

That’d be a massive step towards real-time speech conversion at the pace of natural human conversation.

Max Hodak, who founded BCI company Neuralink alongside Elon Musk, but wasn’t involved in the study, called the research “a meaningful step change in the utility of implanted BCIs” in an email to Futurism.

So for those workers who have managed to hold on to their jobs, their working conditions are likely to get a little worse. For one, Github has announced that they’ll be switching to Microsoft Teams for their videoconferencing, and moving their laptop refresh schedule up to four years from the current three.

Could be worse, obviously, but still.

CEO Thomas Dohmke sent out an email to Github staff saying that “Although our entire leadership team has carefully deliberated this step and come to agreement, ultimately, as CEO the decision is mine. I recognize this will be difficult on you all, and we will approach this period with the utmost respect for every Hubber.”

Adhering to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled annually since the 1960s, but this growth is expected to reach its limit as silicon, the foundation of modern transistors, loses its electrical properties when devices made from it dip below a certain size.

Enter 2D materials — delicate, two-dimensional sheets of perfect crystals that are as thin as a single atom.

An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.

The University of Tennessee’s physicists have led a scientific team that found silicon—a mainstay of the soon-to-be trillion-dollar electronics industry—can host a novel form of superconductivity that could bring rapidly emerging quantum technologies closer to industrial scale production.

The findings are reported in Nature Physics and involve electron theft, time reversal, and a little electronic ambidexterity.

Superconductors conduct electric current without resistance or energy dissipation. Their uses range from powerful electromagnets for particle accelerators and medical MRI devices to ultrasensitive magnetic sensors to quantum computers. Superconductivity is a spectacular display of quantum mechanics in action on a macroscopic scale. It all comes down to the electrons.