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Category: computing – Page 377

Mitigating and reversing the effects of climate change is the most important scientific challenge facing humanity. Carbon sequestration describes a range of technologies with the potential to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Most of these schemes involve storing the gas underground, however, this is not without risk, and scientists are concerned that underground storage could lead to increased seismic activity (a phenomenon known as “induced seismicity”).

Now, researchers in the US and Switzerland have studied microseismicity, the small seismic events caused by carbon injection into host rock, at the Illinois Basin Decatur Project (IBDP) in the midwestern US. In 2011–2014, the IBDP injected one million tonnes of CO2 into an underground reservoir just above a rhyolite crystalline basin. Nikita Bondarenko and Roman Makhnenko at the University of Illinois and Yury Podladchikov at the University of Lausanne have used a combination of field observations and computer simulations to show how microseismicity at the IBDP is highly dependent on the microscale structure of the host rock.

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A research group led by 2014 Nobel laureate Hiroshi Amano at Nagoya University’s Institute of Materials and Systems for Sustainability (IMaSS) in central Japan, in collaboration with Asahi Kasei Corporation, has successfully conducted the world’s first room-temperature continuous-wave lasing of a deep-ultraviolet laser diode (wavelengths down to UV-C region).

These results, published in Applied Physics Letters, represent a step toward the widespread use of a technology with the potential for a wide range of applications, including and medicine.

Since they were introduced in the 1960s, and after decades of research and development, successful commercialization of laser diodes (LDs) was finally achieved for a number of applications with wavelengths ranging from infrared to blue-violet. Examples of this technology include optical communications devices with infrared LDs and Blu-ray discs using blue-violet LDs.

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A recent study, affiliated with South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has reported a scalable synthetic strategy to fabricate low-resistance edge contacts to atomic transistors using a thermally stable 2D metal, namely PtTe2.

Developing cheaper, smaller, and better-performing semiconductors with other than (Si), is expected to gain , thanks to a recent study from UNIST. This will aid in reducing the space between semiconductors and metals within to ∼1 nm, which could help maintain .

Published in the August 2022 issue of Nature Communications, this study has been jointly led by Professor Soon-Yong Kwon and Professor Zonghoon Lee in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST.

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Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be—allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart.

A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of universes, so we shouldn’t be surprised that at least one has turned out as ours. But another is that our universe is a computer simulation, with someone (perhaps an advanced alien species) fine-tuning the conditions.

The latter option is supported by a branch of science called information physics, which suggests that space-time and matter are not fundamental phenomena. Instead, the physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information, from which our experience of space-time emerges. By comparison, temperature “emerges” from the collective movement of atoms. No single atom fundamentally has temperature.

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A new study has revealed how the glass-like shells of diatoms help these microscopic organisms perform photosynthesis in dim conditions. A better understanding of how these phytoplankton harvest and interact with light could lead to improved solar cells, sensing devices and optical components.

“The and toolkit we developed could pave the way toward mass-manufacturable, sustainable optical devices and more efficient harvesting tools that are based on shells,” said research team member Santiago Bernal from McGill University in Canada. “This could be used for biomimetic devices for sensing, new telecommunications technologies or affordable ways to make clean energy.”

Diatoms are found in most bodies of water. Their shells are covered in holes that respond to light differently depending on their size, spacing and configuration. In the journal Optical Materials Express, the researchers, led by McGill University’s David V. Plant and Mark Andrews, report the first optical study of an entire diatom shell. They analyzed how different sections of the shell, or frustule, respond to sunlight and how this response is connected to photosynthesis.

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For the first time in experimental history, researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) have created a device that generates twisted neutrons with well-defined orbital angular momentum. Previously considered an impossibility, this groundbreaking scientific accomplishment provides a brand new avenue for researchers to study the development of next-generation quantum materials with applications ranging from quantum computing to identifying and solving new problems in fundamental physics.

“Neutrons are a powerful probe for the characterization of emerging quantum materials because they have several unique features,” said Dr. Dusan Sarenac, research associate with IQC and technical lead, Transformative Quantum Technologies at the University of Waterloo. “They have nanometer-sized wavelengths, electrical neutrality, and a relatively large mass. These features mean can pass through materials that X-rays and light cannot.”

While methods for the experimental production and analysis of in photons and electrons are well-studied, a design using neutrons has never been demonstrated until now. Because of their distinct characteristics, the researchers had to construct new devices and create novel methods for working with neutrons.

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NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer allowed scientists to probe a distant blazar, shedding new light on the cosmic giants.

Scientists made observations of bright, shining jets of particles shooting out of a supermassive black hole and they published their findings in a paper in Nature.

Investigating a blazar with state-of-the-art instruments.

Pablo Garcia (NASA/MSFC)

The observations shed new light on the high-energy mechanisms of black holes and will help to improve existing computer models of the cosmic giants at the center of most of the galaxies in the observable universe. They also shed new light on the energy mechanisms of blazars, some of the most mysterious objects in the cosmos.

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The ability to link mind and machine has long been the realm of science fiction, but now improvements in our understanding may allow us to network brain to computer in the near future. Companies like Neurolink have begun to explore how to link our neurons to machine, and we’ll explore now such neural interfaces might function and how they might change our lives.

Neurolink Paper, “An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels”: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v1

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Researchers have investigated the capability of known quantum computing algorithms for fault-tolerant quantum computing to simulate the laser-driven electron dynamics of excitation and ionization processes in small molecules. Their research is published in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.

“These quantum algorithms were originally developed in a completely different context. We used them here for the first time to calculate electron densities of , in particular their dynamic evolution after excitation by a ,” says Annika Bande, who heads a group on at Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers (HZB). Bande and Fabian Langkabel, who is doing his doctorate with her, show in the study how well this works.

“We developed an algorithm for a fictitious, completely error-free quantum computer and ran it on a classical server simulating a quantum computer of ten qubits,” says Langkabel. The scientists limited their study to smaller molecules in order to be able to perform the calculations without a real quantum computer and to compare them with conventional calculations.

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