Category Physics

Concordia researchers have developed a new 3D-printing technique that uses sound waves to directly print tiny structures onto soft polymers like silicone with far greater precision than before. The approach, called proximal sound printing, opens new possibilities for manufacturing microscale devices used in health care, environmental monitoring and advanced sensors. It is described in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering.

The technique relies on focused ultrasound to trigger chemical reactions that solidify liquid polymers exactly where printing is needed...

Robots and self-driving cars could soon benefit from a new kind of brain-inspired hardware that can allegedly detect movement and react faster than a human. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications details how an international team built their neuromorphic temporal-attention hardware system to speed up automated driving decisions.

The problem with current robotic vision and self-driving vehicles is a significant delay in processing what they see. While today’s top AI programs can recognize objects accurately, the calculations are so complex that they can take up to half a second to complete...

A team of US researchers has unveiled a device that can conduct electricity along its fractionally charged edges without losing energy to heat. Described in Nature Physics, the work, led by Xiaodong Xu at the University of Washington, marks the first demonstration of a “dissipationless fractional Chern insulator,” a long-sought state of matter with promising implications for future quantum technologies.

From quantum Hall to fractional phases
The quantum Hall effect emerges when electrons are confined to a two-dimensional material, cooled to extremely loow temperatures, and exposed to strong magnetic fields...

Using ideas borrowed from topological photonics, researchers in Singapore, France and the US have designed a compact antenna capable of handling information-rich terahertz (THz) signals. Reporting their results in Nature Photonics, the team, led by Ranjan Singh at the University of Notre Dame, say that with further refinements, the design could help underpin future sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, allowing data to be shared at unprecedented speeds.

Why 6G needs terahertz antennas
In the not-too-distant future, 6G networks are expected to enable data rates of around one terabit per second—the same as transferring roughly half the storage of a mid-range smartphone in a single second...