Category Physics

Researchers have focused on the moisture present in the air as a potential source of drinking water for drought-stressed populations. They reached a significant breakthrough in their efforts to create drinkable water out of thin air: a molecularly engineered hydrogel that can create clean water using just the energy from sunlight.

For significant portions of the globe faced with water shortage problems, a beacon of hope may be on the way: the ability to easily turn hot air into drinking water.

For the past few years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have focused on the moisture present in the air as a potential source of drinking water for drought-stressed populations...

New optical system designed to target and control individual atoms. Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers.

This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths of the width of a single human hair. The precision and extent to which each focused laser beam on its target qubit can be controlled in parallel is unmatched by previous research.

“Our design limits the amount of crosstalk-the amount of light ...

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing have used machine learning to perform error correction for quantum computers—a crucial step for making these devices practical—using an autonomous correction system that despite being approximate, can efficiently determine how best to make the necessary corrections.

In contrast to classical computers, which operate on bits that can only take the basic values 0 and 1, quantum computers operate on “qubits”, which can assume any superposition of the computational basis states...

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in the development of non-volatile phase change memory −a type of electronic memory that can store data even when the power is turned off−−in a material that has never displayed the sort of characteristics that such memory requires.

Until now, phase change memory has primarily been developed using chalcogenides − a group of materials known to exhibit reversible electrical changes when they ...