Category Physics

A trio of AI researchers at Google’s Google DeepMind, working with a colleague from the University of Toronto, report that the AI algorithm Dreamer can learn to self-improve by mastering Minecraft in a short amount of time. In their study published in the journal Nature, Danijar Hafner, Jurgis Pasukonis, Timothy Lillicrap and Jimmy Ba programmed the AI app to play Minecraft without being trained and to achieve an expert level in just nine days.

Over the past several years, computer scientists have learned a lot about how deep learning can be used to train AI applications to conduct seemingly intelligent activities such as answering questions...

Did you know that the camera sensor in your smartphone could help unlock the secrets of antimatter? The AEgIS collaboration, led by Professor Christoph Hugenschmidt’s team from the research neutron source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a detector using modified mobile camera sensors to image, in real time, the points where antimatter annihilates with matter.

This new device, described in a paper published in Science Advances, can pinpoint antiproton annihilations with a resolution of about 0.6 micrometers, a 35-fold improvement over previous real-time methods.

AEgIS and other experiments at CERN’s Antimatter Factory, such as ALPHA and GBAR, are on a mission to measure the free-fall of antihydrogen within Earth’s gravitational field with high pr...

Superconductivity is a quantum physical state in which a metal is able to conduct electricity perfectly without any resistance. In its most familiar application, it enables powerful magnets in MRI machines to create the magnetic fields that allow doctors to see inside our bodies. Thus far, materials can only achieve superconductivity at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (a few tens of Kelvin or colder).

But physicists dream of superconductive materials that might one day operate at room temperature. Such materials could open entirely new possibilities in areas such as quantum computing, the energy sector, and medical technologies.

“Understanding the mechanisms leading to the formation of superconductivity and discovering exotic new superconducting phases is not only...

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new application to increase efficiency in memory systems for high-performance computing.

Rather than allow data to bog down traditional memory systems in supercomputers and impact performance, the team from ORNL, along with researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, created a framework to manage data more efficiently with memory systems that employ more complex structures. Research papers detailing their work were recently accepted in ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization and the International Journal of High-Performance Computing Applications.

Working under the Exascale Computing Project, or ECP, a multi-year software research, development and deployment pro...