Lifeboat Foundation

Traffic lights at intersections are managed by simple computers that assign the right of way to the nonconflicting direction. However, studies looking at travel times in urban areas have shown that delays caused by intersections make up 12–55% of daily commute travel, which could be reduced if the operation of these controllers can be made more efficient to avoid unnecessary wait times.

New photo-ferroelectric materials allow storage of information in a non-volatile way using light stimulus. The idea is to create energy efficient memory devices with high performance and versatility to face current challenges. The study has been published in Nature Communications by Josep Fontcuberta and co-workers and opens a path towards further investigations on this phenomenon and to neuromorphic computing applications.

Can you imagine controlling the properties of a material by just shining light on it? We are used to seeing that the temperature of materials increases when exposed to the sun. But light may also have subtler effects. Indeed, light photons can create pairs of free charge carriers in otherwise insulating materials. This is the basic principle of the photovoltaic panels we use to harvest electrical energy from sun.

In a new twist, a light-induced change of materials’ properties could be used in memory devices, allowing more efficient storage of information and faster access and computing. This, in fact, is one of our society’s current challenges: being able to develop high-performance commercially available electronic devices which are, at the same time, energy efficient. Smaller electronic devices having lower energy consumption and high performance and versatility are the goal.

Although no list like this can be definitive, we polled dozens of researchers over the past year to develop a diverse line-up of ten software tools that have had a big impact on the world of science. You can weigh in on our choices at the end of the story.

From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed.

Even if you weren’t a physics major, you’ve probably heard something about the Higgs boson.

Researchers at Osaka City University use quantum superposition states and Bayesian inference to create a quantum algorithm, easily executable on quantum computers, that accurately and directly calculates energy differences between the electronic ground and excited spin states of molecular systems in polynomial time.

Understanding how the natural world works enables us to mimic it for the benefit of humankind. Think of how much we rely on batteries. At the core is understanding molecular structures and the behavior of electrons within them. Calculating the energy differences between a molecule’s electronic ground and excited spin states helps us understand how to better use that molecule in a variety of chemical, biomedical and industrial applications. We have made much progress in molecules with closed-shell systems, in which electrons are paired up and stable. Open-shell systems, on the other hand, are less stable and their underlying electronic behavior is complex, and thus more difficult to understand. They have unpaired electrons in their ground state, which cause their energy to vary due to the intrinsic nature of electron spins, and makes measurements difficult, especially as the molecules increase in size and complexity.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.

Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure of the material that protects the electrons from doing so. These anomalous electron transport channels, protected by symmetry and topology, don’t normally occur in conventional metals such as copper. After decades of being described only in the context of theoretical physics, there is growing interest in fabricating, exploring, refining, and controlling their topologically protected electronic properties for device applications. For example, wide-scale adoption of quantum computing requires building devices in which fragile quantum states are protected from impurities and noisy environments. One approach to achieve this is through the development of topological quantum computation, in which qubits are based on “symmetry-protected” dissipationless electric currents that are immune to noise.

“Light-induced lattice twisting, or a phononic switch, can control the crystal inversion symmetry and photogenerate giant electric current with very small resistance,” said Jigang Wang, senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and professor of physics at Iowa State University. “This new control principle does not require static electric or magnetic fields, and has much faster speeds and lower energy cost.”

Taiwan contract chip maker TSMC will begin ‘risk production’ of its 3-nanometre process this year, a technology advance that will deliver higher performance and longer battery life for 5G smartphones and other high-end electronics products.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has used drones to create a prototype of a small airborne quantum network. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe sending entangled particles from one drone to another and from a drone to the ground.

Computer scientists, physicists and engineers have been working over the last several years toward building a usable quantum network —doing so would involve sending entangled particles between users and the result would be the most secure network ever made. As part of that effort, researchers have sent entangled particles over fiber cables, between towers and even from satellites to the ground. In this new effort, the researchers have added a new element—drones.

To build a long-range quantum network, satellites appear to be the ideal solution. But for smaller networks, such as for communications between users in the same city, another option is needed. While towers can be of some use, they are subject to weather and blockage, intentional or otherwise. To get around this problem, the researchers used drones to carry the signals.

Scientists at the Institute of Physics of the University of Tartu have found a way to develop optical quantum computers of a new type. Central to the discovery are rare earth ions that have certain characteristics and can act as quantum bits. These would give quantum computers ultrafast computation speed and better reliability compared to earlier solutions. The University of Tartu researchers Vladimir Hizhnyakov, Vadim Boltrushko, Helle Kaasik and Yurii Orlovskii published the results of their research in the scientific journal Optics Communications.

While in ordinary computers, the units of information are binary digits or bits, in quantum computers the units are quantum bits or qubits. In an ordinary computer, information is mostly carried by electricity in memory storage cells consisting of field-effect transistors, but in a quantum computer, depending on the type of computer, the information carriers are much smaller particles, for example ions, photons and electrons. The qubit information may be carried by a certain characteristic of this particle (for example, spin of electron or polarization of photon), which may have two states. While the values of an ordinary bit are 0 or 1, also intermediate variants of these values are possible in the quantum bit. The intermediate state is called the superposition. This property gives quantum computers the ability to solve tasks, which ordinary computers are unable to perform within reasonable time.