Category Physics

Researchers have developed a way to create photonic time crystals and shown that these bizarre, artificial materials amplify the light that shines on them. These findings, described in a paper in Science Advances, could lead to more efficient and robust wireless communications and significantly improved lasers.

Time crystals were first conceived by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012. Mundane, familiar crystals have a structural pattern that repeats in space, but in a time crystal, the pattern repeats in time instead. While some physicists were initially sceptical that time crystals could exist, recent experiments have succeeding in creating them...

Meta took a big leap forward this week with the unveiling of a model that can detect and isolate objects in an image even if it never saw them before. The technology is introduced and described in an article on the arXiv pre-print server.

The AI tool represents a major advance in one of technology’s tougher challenges: allowing computers to detect and comprehend the elements of a previously unseen image and isolate them for user interaction.

It recalls a concept the former chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Robert O. Work once described: “What AI and machine learning allows you to do is find the needle in the haystack.”

In this instance, Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM) hunts for related pixels in an image and identifies the common compone...

A bioinformatics boot camp for high schoolers at Skoltech turned into a venue for the latest chapter in the ongoing contest between humans and artificial intelligence in science. Having earlier resolved a key 50-year-old problem of structural bioinformatics, the breakthrough AI program AlphaFold proved inapplicable to another challenge researchers in this field are faced with.

This finding is reported in a PLOS ONE study, whose authors refute the claims by some AlphaFold enthusiasts that DeepMind’s AI has mastered the ultimate protein physics and is the be-all and end-all of structural bioinformatics.

Structural bioinfor...

An international group of researchers has created a mixed magnon state in an organic hybrid perovskite material by utilizing the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya-Interaction (DMI). The resulting material has potential for processing and storing quantum computing information. The work also expands the number of potential materials that can be used to create hybrid magnonic systems.

In magnetic materials, quasi-particles called magnons direct the electron spin within the material. There are two types of magnons — optical and acoustic — which refer to the direction of their spin.

“Both optical and acoustic magnons propagate spin waves in antiferromagnets,” says Dali Sun, associate professor of physics and member of the Organic and Car...