Category Physics

Photonic Filter Separates Signals from Noise to Support Future 6G Wireless Communication

Photonic filter separates signals from noise to support future 6G wireless communication
Illustration of how the integrated microwave photonic filter helps to separate signals of interest from background noise or unwanted interference in complex electromagnetic environments. Credit: Peking University research team

Researchers have developed a new chip-sized microwave photonic filter to separate communication signals from noise and suppress unwanted interference across the full radio frequency spectrum. The device is expected to help next-generation wireless communication technologies efficiently convey data in an environment that is becoming crowded with signals from devices such as cell phones, self-driving vehicles, internet-connected appliances and smart city infrastructure.

“This new microwave filter chip has the potential to improve wireless communication, such as ...

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A new type of Photonic Time Crystal gives Light a Boost

 Time varying interface and light
Time varying interface and light. Photo: Viktar Asadchy

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...

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Powerful new Meta AI Tool can Identify Individual Items within Images

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...

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AlphaFault: High schoolers give Fabled AI a Problem it Can’t Crack

Poster of the project Playing With AlphaFold2 at the School of Molecular and Theoretical Biology held by Skoltech online in 2021. Credit: Dmitry Ivankov/Skoltech

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...

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