Category Technology/Electronics

Researchers discover excellent thermoelectric properties of nickel-gold alloys. These can be used to efficiently convert heat into electrical energy. Thermoelectrics enable the direct conversion of heat into electrical energy – and vice versa. This makes them interesting for a range of technological applications. In the search for thermoelectric materials with the best possible properties, a research team at TU Wien investigated various metallic alloys. A mixture of nickel and gold proved particularly promising. The researchers recently published their results in the journal Science Advances.

Using thermoelectrics to generate el...

In a new paper, researchers report a camera that could offer a much less expensive way to achieve ultrafast imaging for a wide range of applications such as real-time monitoring of drug delivery or high-speed lidar systems for autonomous driving. Researchers show that their new diffraction-gated real-time ultrahigh-speed mapping (DRUM) camera can capture a dynamic event in a single exposure at 4.8 million frames per second.

Captur...

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed small robotic devices that can change how they move through the air by “snapping” into a folded position during their descent.

When these “microfliers” are dropped from a drone, they use a Miura-ori origami fold to switch from tumbling and dispersing outward through the air to dropping straight to the ground...

New optical system designed to target and control individual atoms. Using laser light, researchers have developed the most robust method currently known to control individual qubits made of the chemical element barium. The ability to reliably control a qubit is an important achievement for realizing future functional quantum computers.

This new method, developed at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), uses a small glass waveguide to separate laser beams and focus them four microns apart, about four-hundredths of the width of a single human hair. The precision and extent to which each focused laser beam on its target qubit can be controlled in parallel is unmatched by previous research.

“Our design limits the amount of crosstalk-the amount of light ...