Lifeboat Foundation

The central principle of superconductivity is that electrons form pairs. But can they also condense into foursomes? Recent findings have suggested they can, and a physicist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology today published the first experimental evidence of this quadrupling effect and the mechanism by which this state of matter occurs.

Reporting in Nature Physics, Professor Egor Babaev and collaborators presented evidence of fermion quadrupling in a series of experimental measurements on the iron-based material, Ba1−xKxFe2As2. The results follow nearly 20 years after Babaev first predicted this kind of phenomenon, and eight years after he published a paper predicting that it could occur in the material.

The pairing of electrons enables the quantum state of superconductivity, a zero-resistance state of conductivity which is used in MRI scanners and quantum computing. It occurs within a material as a result of two electrons bonding rather than repelling each other, as they would in a vacuum. The phenomenon was first described in a theory by, Leon Cooper, John Bardeen and John Schrieffer, whose work was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. unveiled a new server chip that’s based on advanced 5-nanometer technology, marking a milestone in China’s pursuit of semiconductor self-sufficiency.

The Chinese tech giant’s newest chip is based on micro-architecture provided by the SoftBank Group Corp.-owned Arm Ltd., according to a statement Tuesday. Alibaba, which is holding its annual cloud summit in Hangzhou, said the silicon will be put to use in its own data centers in the “near future” and will not be sold commercially, at least for now.

“Customizing our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts toward boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and head of Alibaba’s research arm Damo Academy. “We plan to use the chips to support current and future businesses across the Alibaba Group ecosystem.”

Magnetic solids can be demagnetized quickly with a short laser pulse, and there are already so-called HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) memories on the market that function according to this principle. However, the microscopic mechanisms of ultrafast demagnetization remain unclear. Now, a team at HZB has developed a new method at BESSY II to quantify one of these mechanisms and they have applied it to the rare-earth element Gadolinium, whose magnetic properties are caused by electrons on both the 4f and the 5d shells. This study completes a series of experiments done by the team on nickel and iron-nickel alloys. Understanding these mechanisms is useful for developing ultrafast data storage devices.

New materials should make information processing more efficient, for example, through ultrafast spintronic devices that store data with less energy input. But to date, the microscopic mechanisms of ultrafast demagnetization are not fully understood. Typically, the process of demagnetization is studied by sending an ultrashort laser pulse to the sample, thereby heating it up, and then analyzing how the system evolves in the first picoseconds afterward.

Arm is releasing new chip design offerings in the internet of things (IoT), virtual hardware, and 5G sectors.

Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Arm designs the architecture that other licensed chip makers use to build their chips. Arm likes to make it easier for those licensees to come up with their applications and create a foundation for an IoT economy.

So the company said its Arm Total Solutions for IoT now delivers a full-stack solution to significantly accelerate the development and return-on-investment for IoT chip products. And Arm Virtual Hardware removes the need to develop on physical silicon, enabling software and hardware co-design and accelerating product design by up to two years, the company claimed.

IoT Evolution World magazine announced today the recipients of their 2021 IoT Edge Computing Excellence Awards. This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space…

“Innovation in edge computing is separating the good from the great, pretenders and contenders,” said Moe Nagle, Editorial Director for IoT Evolution. “In selecting the winners, it is easy to see why these companies and their solutions have risen to the top.”

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it’s possible to use Facebook’s targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook’s platform assigns them.

The paper — entitled “Unique on Facebook: Formulation and Evidence of (Nano)targeting Individual Users with non-PII Data” — describes a “data-driven model” that defines a metric showing the probability a Facebook user can be uniquely identified based on interests attached to them by the ad platform.

The researchers demonstrate that they were able to use Facebook’s Ads manager tool to target a number of ads in such a way that each ad only reached a single, intended Facebook user.

Research from Inmarsat has found that investment in the IoT is set to overtake cloud computing and other digital transformation technologies.

Oct. 13 2021 — In 1,998 researchers including Mark Kubinec of UC Berkeley performed one of the first simple quantum computations using individual molecules. They used pulses of radio waves to flip the spins of two nuclei in a molecule, with each spin’s “up” or “down” orientation storing information in the way that a “0” or “1” state stores information in a classical data bit. In those early days of quantum computers, the combined orientation of the two nuclei – that is, the molecule’s quantum state – could only be preserved for brief periods in specially tuned environments. In other words, the system quickly lost its coherence. Control over quantum coherence is the missing step to building scalable quantum computers.

Now, researchers are developing new pathways to create and protect quantum coherence. Doing so will enable exquisitely sensitive measurement and information processing devices that function at ambient or even extreme conditions. In 2,018 Joel Moore, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and professor at UC Berkeley, secured funds from the Department of Energy to create and lead an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) – called the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials (NPQC) – to further those efforts. “The EFRCs are an important tool for DOE to enable focused inter-institutional collaborations to make rapid progress on forefront science problems that are beyond the scope of individual investigators,” said Moore.

Through the NPQC, scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Argonne National Laboratory, and Columbia University are leading the way to understand and manipulate coherence in a variety of solid-state systems. Their threefold approach focuses on developing novel platforms for quantum sensing; designing two-dimensional materials that host complex quantum states; and exploring ways to precisely control a material’s electronic and magnetic properties via quantum processes. The solution to these problems lies within the materials science community. Developing the ability to manipulate coherence in realistic environments requires in-depth understanding of materials that could provide alternate quantum bit (or “qubit”), sensing, or optical technologies.

To fully digitize the last mile of business, you need to distribute compute power where it’s needed most — right next to IoT devices that collect data from the real world.