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Scientists have characterized the quantum behavior of buckminsterfullerene molecules, also known as buckyballs, with the hope of perhaps one day turning them into miniature quantum computers.

Buckyballs are the Nobel Prize-winning molecules that consist of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a closed, soccer ball-shape. Their peculiar structure bestows them with strange observable quantum properties, and has given them uses in solar panels and even medicine. But a team of scientists from JILA, a research institute run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, has made measurements in preparation for exploiting buckyballs’ quantum properties in even stranger ways.

Spectrally pure lasers lie at the heart of precision high-end scientific and commercial applications, thanks to their ability to produce near-perfect single-color light. A laser’s capacity to do so is measured in terms of its linewidth, or coherence, which is the ability to emit a constant frequency over a certain period of time before that frequency changes.

In practice, researchers go to great lengths to build highly coherent, near-single-frequency lasers for high-end systems such as atomic clocks. Today, however, because these lasers are large and occupy racks full of equipment, they are relegated to applications based on bench tops in the laboratory.

There is a push to move the performance of high-end lasers onto photonic micro-chips, dramatically reducing cost and size while making the technology available to a wide range of applications including spectroscopy, navigation, quantum computation and optical communications. Achieving such performance at the chip scale would also go a long way to address the challenge posed by the internet’s exploding data-capacity requirements and the resulting increase in worldwide energy consumption of data centers and their fiber-optic interconnects.

The University of Michigan has come up with a temperature sensing “computer” measuring just 0.3mm — so small it beats the one developed by IBM.

It is about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter, and so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The term “computer” is used loosely by the university, as it continues to question what exactly a computer is. It does have a processor, but unlike a full-sized computer, it loses all data when it loses power.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest computer is so tiny that it makes a grain of rice look gigantic” »

How it works, why it’s so powerful, and where it’s likely to be most useful first.

The rules of quantum mechanics describe how atoms and molecules act very differently from the world around us. Scientists have made progress toward teasing out these rules—essential for finding ways to make new molecules and better technology—but some are so complex that they evade experimental verification.

With the advent of open-access quantum computers, scientists at the University of Chicago saw an opportunity to do a very unusual experiment to test some of these quantum principles. Their study, which appeared Jan. 31 in Nature Communications Physics, essentially hijacks a quantum computer to discover fundamental truths about the quantum behavior of electrons in molecules.

“Quantum computing is a really exciting realm to explore fundamental questions. It allows us to observe aspects of quantum theory that are absolutely untouchable with classical computers,” said Prof. David Mazziotti, professor of chemistry and author on the paper.

Continue reading “Scientists ‘hijack’ open-access quantum computer to tease out quantum secrets” »

Stunning new images show how black holes produce tremendously bright jets millions of light-years long that can be seen across vast cosmic distances. The images were produced by a computer simulation and could help resolve an enduring mystery about how the jets form, the researchers behind the images said.

Despite their moniker, black holes aren’t always black. As a black hole consumes an object, gas and dust spins around the maw of the gravitational behemoth, and friction can heat the material on the edges to searing temperatures. This violent process creates lighthouse-like beams of charged particles that travel outward at near light speed, emitting radiation that can shine brighter than an entire galaxy. [11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy]

“They are like laser beams piercing the universe and allowing us to see black holes whose emission would otherwise be too dim to be detectable,” Alexander Tchekhovskoy, a computational astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, told Live Science.

Continue reading “Black hole plasma jets shine like cosmic lighthouses in these gorgeous images” »

At the IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture in February, Illinois computer engineering associate professor Rakesh Kumar and his collaborators will make the case for a wafer-scale computer consisting of as many as 40 GPUs. Simulations of this multiprocessor monster sped calculations nearly 19-fold and cut the combination of energy consumption and signal delay more than 140-fold.

Engineers aim to use “silicon interconnect fabric” to build a computer with 40 GPUs on a single silicon wafer.

A team of researchers at Columbia University has developed a speech brain-computer interface system that translates brain signals into intelligible, recognizable speech. By monitoring someone’s brain activity, the system can reconstruct the words a person hears with unprecedented clarity. The breakthrough, reported in the journal Scientific Reports, could lead to new ways for computers to communicate directly with the brain, and lays the groundwork for helping people who cannot speak.

Small tweaks in component ratios generate electronically different layers from the same material to create transparent transistors.

Worldwide demand is growing for transparent conducting oxides for use in solar cells, flat panel displays, smart windows and semiconductor-based consumer electronics. KAUST researchers have engineered a zinc-oxide-based transparent material that displays tunable electronic properties depending on the tweaking of a new type of dopant.

Transparent electronics rely on indium tin oxide, a transparent and electrically conductive material that has an exorbitant cost due to the scarcity of indium. Zinc-oxide-based materials, such as hafnium-doped zinc-oxide materials, are expected to offer affordable, green and abundant alternatives to indium tin oxide. However, hafnium-doped zinc-oxide materials typically require high deposition temperatures and display inadequate performance for real-life device applications.