Category Physics

Arun Kota’s superomniphobic device can sort droplets by surface tension. Credit: Sanli Movafaghi/Colorado State University

Imagine being able to instantly diagnose diabetes, Ebola or some other disease, simply by watching how a droplet of blood moves on a surface. That’s just one potential impact of new research led by Assistant Prof. Arun Kota, Colorado State University. Kota’s lab makes coatings that repel not just water, but virtually any liquid, including oils and acids – a property called superomniphobicity.

They did it by making their device’s surface tunable, meaning they can manipulate its surface chemistry to turn up or turn down how well it repels liquids...

This is a schematic of an optical tweezer used in a vacuum chamber by Purdue University researchers, who controlled the “electron spin” of a levitated nanodiamond. The advance could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors and studies into the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics. Credit: Purdue University image/ Tongcang Li

Researchers have demonstrated how to control the “electron spin” of a nanodiamond while it is levitated with lasers in a vacuum, an advance that could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors, quantum mechanics studies, and measurement of magnetic and gravitational fields, which could be applied to computer memory and experiments to search for deviations from Newton’s law of gravitation. .

Electrons can be thought of as havin...

Associate Professor Yang Hyunsoo from the National University of Singapore, who led a research team to successfully embed a powerful magnetic memory chip on a plastic material, demonstrating the flexibility of the memory chip. Credit: National University of Singapore

This malleable memory chip is a breakthrough in the flexible electronics revolution, and brings researchers a step closer towards making flexible, wearable electronics a reality in the near future. It looks like a small piece of transparent film with tiny engravings on it, and is flexible enough to be bent into a tube. Yet, this piece of “smart” plastic demonstrates excellent performance in terms of data storage and processing capabilities.

Such devices have great potential in applications such as automotive, healthcare electr...

Hologram of a single photon: reconstructed from raw measurements (left) and theoretically predicted (right). Credit: Source: FUW

Until quite recently, creating a hologram of a single photon was believed to be impossible due to fundamental laws of physics. However, scientists at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, have successfully applied concepts of classical holography to the world of quantum phenomena. A new measurement technique has enabled them to register the first ever hologram of a single light particle, thereby shedding new light on the foundations of quantum mechanics. “We performed a relatively simple experiment to measure and view something incredibly difficult to observe: the shape of wavefronts of a single photon,” says Dr. Chrapkiewicz.

In standard photography, ind...