Category Technology/Electronics

Chemists could yield future devices such as next-gen displays and solar cells. A new study introduces a breakthrough in making nanocrystals function together electronically. The research may open the doors to future devices with new abilities.

You can carry an entire computer in your pocket today because the technological building blocks have been getting smaller and smaller since the 1950s...

Semiconductor electronics is getting faster and faster — but at some point, physics no longer permits any increase. The speed can definitely not be increased beyond one petahertz (one million gigahertz), even if the material is excited in an optimal way with laser pulses.

How fast can electronics be? When computer chips work with ever shorter signals and time intervals, at some point they come up against physical limits. The quantum-mechanical processes that enable the generation of electric current in a semiconductor material take a certain amount of time. This puts a limit to the speed of signal generation and signal transmission.

TU Wien (Vienna), TU Gra...

Two teams of physicists have designed the first programmable quantum sensor, and tested it in the laboratory. To do so they applied techniques from quantum information processing to a measurement problem. The innovative method promises quantum sensors whose precision reaches close to the limit set by the laws of nature.

Atomic clocks are the best sensors humankind has ever built. Today, they can be found in national standards institutes or satellites of navigation systems. Scientists all over the world are working to further optimize the precision of these clocks...

A UNIGE team has succeeded in storing a quantum bit for 20 milliseconds. A duration that had never before been achieved by a solid-state quantum memory.

Computers, smartphones, GPS: quantum physics has enabled many technological advances. It is now opening up new fields of research in cryptography (the art of coding messages) with the aim of developing ultrasecure telecommunications networks. There is one obstacle, however: after a few hundred kilometers within an optical fiber, the photons that carry the qubits or ‘quantum bits’ (the information) disappear...