Category Physics

Coulomb blockade currents measured in a conducting polymer monolayer and a 2D charge transport model. Background is schematic of the monolayer on electrodes. Credit: Image courtesy of Osaka University

Generally, organic conductors has disorder structures so charge transfers from one place with high conductivity to another place with high conductivity. In such occasions, Coulomb blockade of charge transport takes place. It was thought Coulomb blockade took place in low dimensional aggregates of inorganic particulates only at very low temps.

Osaka Uni researchers succeeded in showing experimental evidence to prove Coulomb blockade taking place on 2D organic conducting polymer films...

Single atom resolved fluorescence image of a band insulator of fermionic lithium in an optical lattice. Credit: MPQ, Quantum Many Body Systems Division

Today, quantum optical experiments provide methods to prove the rules math equations. In this regard, scientists in the Quantum Many-Body Division at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have made a big step forward.

The “exclusion principle” was formulated by the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 in order to explain the structure and the stability of atoms. Dr. Christian Groß’s team demonstrated the first direct observation of “Pauli blocking”, a consequence of the exclusion principle. To this end, they cooled a cloud of fermionic lithium-6 atoms down to extremely low temperatures and loaded the particles into an optical lattice...

Human computation (HC), which encompasses methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and distributed knowledge collection offers new promise for addressing wicked problems, by enabling participatory sensing, group intelligence, and collective action at unprecedented scales.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. They present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pa...

HyQ2 is a quadruped that has been in high focus at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Dynamic Legged Systems lab. They have been getting it disaster-ready for search and rescue missions and for environment disasters.

This DLS lab makes high-performance, versatile legged robots. Their torque-controlled hydraulic quadruped robot HyQ is their flagship platform. They need to know if the robot can get back on its feet even if it is completely knocked over. The HyQ robot was developed at the IIT in Genoa. The lab works on achieving accurate hydraulic force/ torque control at the joint level. They explore a variety of different locomotion gaits, strong enough to withstand external disturbances and changing environmental conditions.

A significant part of our groups’ effort is devoted to percept...