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The way electrons interact with photons of light is a vital part of many modern technologies, from lasers to solar panels to LEDs. But the interaction is inherently weak because of a major mismatch in scale: the wavelength of visible light is about 1,000 times larger than an electron, so the way the two things affect each other is limited by that disparity.

Now, researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), MIT and other universities say they have come up with an innovative way to make more robust interactions between photons and electrons possible, that produces a hundredfold increase in the emission of light from a phenomenon called Smith-Purcell radiation. The findings have potential ramifications for both commercial applications and fundamental scientific research, although it will require more years of investigation to put into practice.

The findings are published in Nature by Dr. Yi Yang (Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics at HKU and a former postdoc at MIT), Dr. Charles Roques-carmes (Postdoctoral Associate at MIT) and Professors Marin Soljačić and John Joannopoulos (MIT professors). The research team also included Steven Kooi at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, Haoning Tang and Eric Mazur at Harvard University, Justin Beroz at MIT, and Ido Kaminer at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

We can expect to the latest and greatest in gaming and computer hardware, audio visual, electric vehicles and smart home technologies.

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The rigorously proven No Free Lunch theorem shows that physicists will always be needed to determine the correct questions.

The ability to transmit and manipulate, with minimal loss, the smallest unit of light—the photon—plays a pivotal role in optical communications as well as designs for quantum computers that would use light rather than electric charges to store and carry information.

Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have connected, on a single microchip, quantum dots—artificial atoms that generate individual photons rapidly and on-demand when illuminated by a laser—with miniature circuits that can guide the light without significant loss of intensity.

To create the ultra-low-loss circuits, the researchers fabricated silicon-nitride waveguides—the channels through which the photons traveled—and buried them in silicon dioxide. The channels were wide but shallow, a geometry that reduced the likelihood that photons would scatter out of the waveguides. Encapsulating the waveguides in silicon dioxide also helped to reduce scattering.

Scientists are increasingly studying quantum entanglement, which occurs when two or more systems are created or interact in such a manner that the quantum states of some cannot be described independently of the quantum states of the others. The systems are correlated, even when they are separated by a large distance. The significant potential for applications in encryption, communications and quantum computing spurs research. The difficulty is that when the systems interact with their surroundings, they almost immediately become disentangled.

In the latest study by the Laboratory for Coherent Manipulation of Atoms and Light (LMCAL) at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute (IF-USP) in Brazil, the researchers succeeded in developing a light source that produced two entangled light beams. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.

“This light source was an optical parametric oscillator, or OPO, which is typically made up of a non-linear optical response crystal between two mirrors forming an optical cavity. When a bright green beam shines on the apparatus, the crystal-mirror dynamics produces two light beams with quantum correlations,” said physicist Hans Marin Florez, last author of the article.

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According to the firm, such TVs are part of its vision to advance the versatility of such screens, allowing users to utilize them in multiple ways. “To achieve this vision, it’s important to re-architect television by eliminating all common frustrations and making it extremely easy to secure televisions on any surface inside homes. By realizing this vision, Displace is effectively creating the next computing platform, and the potential applications are limitless.” said founder and CEO Balaji Krishnan.

The US has moved to restrict export of EDA software. What is it, and how will the move affect China?

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MIT neuroscientists have published a key new insight on how working memory functions, in a study published in PLOS Computational Biology.

The researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory compared measurements of brain cell activity in an animal performing a working memory task with the output of various computer models representing two theories on the underlying mechanism for holding information in mind.

The results favored the newer theory that a network of neurons stores information by making short-lived changes in the connections, or synapses, between them, rather than the traditional theory that memory is maintained by neurons remaining persistently active.