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    Category Physics

    Novel Design greatly Improves Output from Commercial Circuit Boards next to Superconducting Qubits

    February 25, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Green commercial circuit boards—the largest is 11.4 cm (4.5 in) by 19 cm (7.5  in)—inside a dilution refrigerator. When enclosed and pumped down, the system reaches temperatures only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Credit: NIST

    Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed and tested a system that allows commercial electronic components—such as microprocessors on circuit boards—to operate in close proximity with ultracold devices employed in quantum information processing. That design allows 4X as much data to be output for the same number of connected wires.

    In the rising excitement about quantum computing, it can be easy to overlook the physical fact that the data produced by manipulation of quantum bits (qubit...

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    More Sensitive X-ray Imaging

    February 25, 2022, Categories  Physics, Health/Medical

    Researchers at MIT have shown how one could improve the efficiency of scintillators by at least tenfold by changing the material’s surface. This image shows a TEM grid on scotch tape, with the right side showing the scene after it is corrected.
    Credits:Image: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT New

    Improvements in the material that converts X-rays into light, for medical or industrial images, could allow a tenfold signal enhancement.

    Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors...

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    Evidence for Exotic Magnetic Phase of Matter

    February 23, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Scientists identify a long-sought magnetic state predicted nearly 60 years ago. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a long-predicted magnetic state of matter called an “antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator.”

    “Broadly speaking, this is a novel type of magnet,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Mark Dean, senior author on a paper describing the research just published in Nature Communications. “Since magnetic materials lie at the heart of much of the technology around us, new types of magnets are both fundamentally fascinating and promising for future applications.”

    The new magnetic state involves strong magnetic attraction between electrons in a layered material that make the electrons want to arrange their magnetic moments, o...

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    Can Machine-Learning Models Overcome Biased Datasets?

    February 22, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Caption:If researchers are training a model to classify cars in images, they want the model to learn what different cars look like. But if every Ford Thunderbird in the training dataset is shown from the front, when the trained model is given an image of a Ford Thunderbird shot from the side, it may misclassify it, even if it was trained on millions of car photos.
    Credits:Image courtesy of the researchers

    Researchers have applied the tools of neuroscience to study when and how an artificial neural network can overcome bias in a dataset. They found that data diversity, not dataset size, is key and that the emergence of certain types of neurons during training plays a major role in how well a neural network is able to overcome dataset bias.

    Artificial intelligence systems may be able t...

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