Category Physics

Researchers have applied a deep learning technique to a previously studied dataset of nearby stars and uncovered eight previously unidentified signals of interest.

When pondering the probability of discovering technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, the question that often arises is, “if they’re out there, why haven’t we found them yet?” And often, the response is that we have only searched a tiny portion of the galaxy. Further, algorithms developed decades ago for the earliest digital computers can be outdated and inefficient when applied to modern petabyte-scale datasets...

Prof. Becky Peterson at the University of Michigan leads a team that has developed a scalable, manufacturable method for developing thin film transistors (TFTs) that operate at the lowest possible voltage. This is particularly important for TFT integration with today’s silicon complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS), which are used in the vast majority of integrated circuits.

“We’re essentially developing a less complicated device that operates at lower voltage,” said ECE Ph.D. student Tonglin (Tanya) Newsom, who is first author on the paper...

In recent years, many physicists and computer scientists have been working on the development of quantum computing technologies. These technologies are based on qubits, the basic units of quantum information. In contrast with classical bits, which have a value of 0 or 1, qubits can exist in superposition states, so they can have a value of 0 and 1 simultaneously. Qubits can be made of different physical systems, including electrons, nuclear spins (i.e., the spin state of a nucleus), photons, and superconducting circuits.

Electron s...

Materials breakthrough in microfabrication could lead to a new generation of smaller, faster, energy-efficient electronics. A research group has succeeded in measuring spin transport in a thin film of specific molecules — a material well-known in organic light emitting diodes — at room temperature. They found that this thin molecular film has a spin diffusion length of approximately 62 nm, a length that could have practical applications in developing spintronics technology. In addition, while electricity has been used to control spin transport in the past, the thin molecular film used in this study is photoconductive, allowing spin transport control using visible light.

Information processing dev...