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    Category Technology/Electronics

    A Chip-Scale Broadband Light Source in Silicon Carbide

    March 21, 2022, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Physics

    (a) Schematic top view (left) and cross section (right) of the 4H-silicon-carbide-on-insulator platform for frequency comb generation based on compact microring resonators. The sidewall angle (θ) is estimated near 80–85 deg in our nanofabrication. Dispersion engineering is carried out by varying the ring waveguide width (RW). In addition, efficient coupling is realized using the pulley structure where the access waveguide width and coupling length are adjusted to achieve phase matching to the desired resonant mode families. (b) Scanning electron micrograph of a 36-μm-radius SiC microring. In this work, the SiC thickness is fixed at 500 nm with a pedestal layer of 50 nm. (c) Simulated integrated dispersion [Dint; see its definition in Eq. (1)] for the fundamental transverse-electric (i.e...
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    New Acoustic Fabric Converts Audible Sounds into Electrical Signals

    March 18, 2022, Categories  Technology/Electronics

    Caption:An MIT team has designed an “acoustic fabric,” woven with a fiber that is designed from a “piezoelectric” material that produces an electrical signal when bent or mechanically deformed, providing a means for the fabric to convert sound vibrations into electrical signals.
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    Researchers have developed a new acoustic fabric converts audible sounds into electrical signals. They designed a fabric that works like a microphone, converting sound first into mechanical vibrations, then into electrical signals, similarly to how our ears hear.

    Having trouble hearing? Just turn up your shirt. That’s the idea behind a new “acoustic fabric” developed by engineers at MIT and collaborators at Rhode Island School of Design.

    All fabrics vibrate in response to audible sounds, th...

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    When it comes to AI, can we Ditch the Datasets?

    March 16, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    MIT researchers have demonstrated the use of a generative machine-learning model to create synthetic data, based on real data, that can be used to train another model for image classification. This image shows examples of the generative model’s transformation methods. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Huge amounts of data are needed to train machine-learning models to perform image classification tasks, such as identifying damage in satellite photos following a natural disaster. However, these data are not always easy to come by. Datasets may cost millions of dollars to generate, if usable data exist in the first place, and even the best datasets often contain biases that negatively impact a model’s performance.

    To circumvent some of the problems presented by datasets, M...

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    Magnetism helps Electrons Vanish in High-temp Superconductors

    March 11, 2022, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    The Fermi surface on the left shows the arrangement of electrons in a copper-oxide high temperature superconductor before the “critical point.” After the critical point, the Fermi surface on the right shows that most electrons vanish. Research by the Brad Ramshaw’s lab connects this disappearance with magnetism.

    A physicist’s discovery could lead to the engineering of high-temp superconducting properties into materials useful for quantum computing, medical imaging.

    Superconductors — metals in which electricity flows without resistance — hold promise as the defining material of the near future, according to physicist Brad Ramshaw, and are already used in medical imaging machines, drug discovery research and quantum computers being built by Google and IBM.

    However, the super-...

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