Category Technology/Electronics

Floquet topological insulators are materials with topological phases that originate from tailored time-dependent perturbations of their crystal structure. These materials have been proved to feature highly unusual electron conduction properties...

Fundamental building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computing demonstrated. For quantum computers to be useful in practice, errors must be detected and corrected. At the University of Innsbruck, Austria, a team of experimental physicists has now implemented a universal set of computational operations on fault-tolerant quantum bits for the first time, demonstrating how an algorithm can be programmed on a quantum computer so that errors do not spoil the result.

In modern computers errors during processing and storage of information have become a rarity due to high-quality fabrication...

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) created a solar cell with a record 39.5% efficiency under 1-sun global illumination. This is the highest efficiency solar cell of any type, measured using standard 1-sun conditions.

“The new cell is more efficient and has a simpler design that may be useful for a variety of new applications, such as highly area-constrained applications or low-radiation space applications,” said Myles Steiner, a senior scientist in NREL’s High-Efficiency Crystalline Photovoltaics (PV) Group and principal investigator on the project...

Researchers from ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich and Empa have developed a new material for an electronic component that can be used in a wider range of applications than its predecessors. Such components will help create electronic circuits that emulate the human brain and that are more efficient at performing machine-​learning tasks.

Compared with computers, the human brain is incredibly energy efficient. Scientists are therefore drawing on how the brain and its interconnected neurons function for inspiration in designing innovative computing technologies...