Category Physics

Depiction of photon recycling inside the crystalline structure of perovskite. Credit: Criss Hohmann

Scientists have discovered that a highly promising group of materials known as hybrid lead halide perovskites can recycle light which could lead to large gains in the efficiency of solar cells. As well as being cheap and easy to produce, perovskite solar cells have, in the space of a few years, become almost as energy-efficient as silicon – the material currently used in most household solar panels.

By showing that they can also be optimised to recycle light, the new study suggests that this could just be the beginning...

Schematics of structures for three kinds of spin-orbit-torque-induced magnetization scheme. (a) The first previous structure where the magnetization is perpendicular to the film plane. (b) The second previous structure where the magnetization is in-plane and orthogonal to channel current. (c) The new structure where the magnetization is in-plane and collinear with the current. Credit: Shunsuke Fukami

Researchers have developed a new-structure magnetic memory device utilizing spin-orbit- torque-induced magnetization switching. For these 2 decades, much effort has been devoted to the development of magnetic random access memories, which store information as the magnetization direction of a magnet...

Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have developed hardware and software to remotely monitor and control devices that mimic the human physiological system. Devices known as organs-on-chips allow researchers to test drug compounds and predict physiological responses with high accuracy in a laboratory setting. But monitoring the results of such experiments from a conventional desktop computer has several limitations, especially when results must be monitored over the course of hours, days or even weeks.

Google Glass, one of the newest forms of wearable technology, offers researchers a hands-free and flexible monitoring system. To make Google Glass work for their purposes, Zhang et al...

Photons are generated simultaneously in pairs, each in one of the photon streams. The detection of photons in one stream indicates the timing information of those in the other. Using this information, a proper timing control is dynamically applied to those photons so they appear at regular intervals. This new technique increases the rate of photons at the regular interval, which is extremely useful for quantum secure communication and quantum photonic computation. Credit: University of Sydney

The interdisciplinary research is set to revolutionize our ability to exchange data securely – along with advancing quantum computing, which can search large databases exponentially faster...