Category Physics

Columbia Engineering researchers report that they have demonstrated a nearly ideal transistor made from a 2D material stack – with only a two-atom-thick semiconducting layer – by developing a completely clean and damage-free fabrication process. Their method shows vastly improved performance compared to 2D semiconductors fabricated with a conventional process, and could provide a scalable platform for creating ultra-clean devices in the future.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering repo...

The invention uses magnets to record computer data which consume virtually zero energy, solving the dilemma of how to create faster data processing speeds without the accompanying high energy costs. Today’s data centre servers consume between 2 to 5% of global electricity consumption, producing heat which in turn requires more power to cool the servers.

The problem is so acute that Microsoft has even submerged hundreds of its data centre services in the ocean in an effort to keep them cool and cut costs. Most data are encoded as binary information (0 or 1 respectively) through the orientation of tiny magnets, called spins, in magnetic hard-drives...

Coating provides extra layer of protection for battery cathodes. Scientists have developed a new cathode coating by using an oxidative chemical vapor deposition technique. It can keep a battery’s cathode electrically and ionically conductive and ensures that the battery stays safe after many cycles. “The coating we’ve discovered really hits five or six birds with one stone.” Khalil Amine, Argonne distinguished fellow and battery scientist.

In the research, Amine and his fellow researchers took particles of Argonne’s pioneering nickel-mangan...

The research, carried out by Professor Andrew Dzurak’s team in UNSW Engineering, was published in the journal Nature. The experiments were performed by Wister Huang, a final-year PhD student in Electrical Engineering, and Dr Henry Yang, a senior research fellow at UNSW.

“All quantum computations can be made up of one-qubit operations and two-qubit operations – they’re the central building blocks of quantum computing,” says Professor Dzurak.

“Once you’ve got those, you can perform any computation you want – but the accuracy of both operations needs to be very high.”

In 2015 Dzurak’s team was the first to build a quantum logic gate in silicon,...