Category Physics

Cubimorph is a modular interactive device that holds touchscreens on each of the six module faces and that uses a hinge-mounted turntable mechanism to self-reconfigure in the user’s hand. One example is a mobile phone that can transform into a console when a user launches a game. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Bristol

A prototype for an interactive mobile device, called Cubimorph, which can change shape on-demand will be presented this week at one of the leading international forums for robotics, ICRA 2016, in Stockholm, Sweden [16-21 May]. There has been a growing interest toward achieving modular interactive devices in the human computer interaction (HCI) community, but so far existing devices consist of folding displays and barely reach high shape resolution.

Cubimorph is a mod...

The experiment, featuring the small red glow of a BEC trapped in infrared laser beams. Credit: Stuart Hay, ANU

Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment.The experiment, developed by physicists from Australian National University and UNSW ADFA, created an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam, aka Bose-Einstein condensate, replicating the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize. “I didn’t expect the machine could learn to do the experiment itself, from scratch, in under an hour,” said Paul Wigley, ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

Bose-Einstein condensates are some of the coldest places in the Universe, far colder than outer space, typically less than a billionth of a degree above 0K...

Scene from Ice Age (2002) processed in the style of The Starry Night. Comparing independent per-frame processing to our time consistent approach, the latter is clearly preferable. Credit: Manuel Ruder, et al.

3 researchers at the University of Freiburg has taken the science of using neural networks to understand the style of paintings done by human hands and applying it to modern photographs, one step further, by applying it to video.

Imagine if you could film a friend with your phone, as he wanders aimlessly down a road on the edges of a quaint village, then use an app to make it look like your friend was wandering through a Starry Night painting, by Vincent Van Gough? It appears the day may be coming when amateur and professional video/movie makers alike may be able to do such things wit...

Image of one of the graphene-based devices Xu and colleagues worked with. Credit: Lei Wang

In traditional light-harvesting methods, energy from 1 photon only excites 1 electron or none depending on the absorber’s energy gap. The remaining energy is lost as heat. But a new article describe an approach to coax photons into stimulating multiple electrons. Their method exploits some surprising quantum-level interactions to give one photon multiple potential electron partners.

Wu and Xu in UW’s Dept of Materials Science & Engineering and the Det of Physics, made this surprising discovery using graphene.
The researchers took a single atom layer of graphene and sandwiched it between 2 thin layers of boron-nitride. Electrons do not flow easily within boron-nitride so it is an insulator.

When the g...