Category Physics

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,...

Collaborating scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Princeton University have discovered a new layered ferromagnetic semiconductor, a rare type of material that holds great promise for next-generation electronic technologies.

As the name implies, semiconductors are the Goldilocks of electrically conductive materials— not a metal, and not an insulator, but a “just-right” in-between whose conducting properties can be altered and customized in ways that create the basis for the world’s modern electronic capabilities. Especially rare are the ones closer to an insulator than to a metal.

The recent discovery o...

What can fly like a bird and hover like an insect? Hummingbirds. If drones had this combo, they would be able to maneuver better through collapsed buildings and other cluttered spaces to find trapped victims. Purdue University researchers have engineered flying robots that behave like hummingbirds, trained by machine learning algorithms based on various techniques the bird uses naturally every day.

This means that after learning from a simulation, the robot “knows” how to move around on its own like a hummingbird would, such as discerning when to perform an esca...