Category Physics

Engineers have invented a breakthrough visible-spectrum, compact, power-efficient, low-loss phase modulator – a breakthrough in integrated photonics; the device will improve LIDAR for remote sensing, AR/VR goggles, quantum information processing chips, implantable optogenetic probes, and more.

Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars...

New highly sensitive quantum sensors for the brain may in the future be able to identify brain diseases such as dementia, ALS and Parkinson’s, by spotting a slowing in the speed at which signals travel across the brain. The research findings from a paper led by University of Sussex quantum physicists are published in Scientific Reports journal.

The quantum scanners being developed by the scientists can detect the magnetic fields generated when neurons fire. Measuring moment-to-moment changes in the brain, they track the speed at which signals move across the brain...

A new tool with cutting-edge image recognition AI lets you visualize the future effects of climate change on any place in the world—including your own home.

The project, titled “This Climate Does Not Exist,” lets you enter the address of your current home or your favorite travel destination and see what it could look like years later once climate change has taken its toll.

You can see how Disneyland will look like covered in smog, the way extreme smog blanketed Beijing in 2014. You can see what your childhood home will look like after it is flooded by rising sea levels, the way floods devastated Indonesia in 2020 after widespread deforestation.

Extreme weather events due to climate change are already impacting corners of the globe.

In a separate ...

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have succeeded in creating an experimental model of an elusive kind of fundamental particle called a skyrmion in a beam of light.

The breakthrough provides physicists with a real system demonstrating the behavior of skyrmions, first proposed 60 years ago by a University of Birmingham mathematical physicist, Professor Tony Skyrme.

Skyrme’s idea used the structure of spheres in 4-dimensional space to guarantee the indivisible nature of a skyrmion particle in 3 dimensions. 3D particle-like skyrmions are theorized to tell us about the early origins of the Universe, or about the physics of exotic materials or cold atoms...