Category Technology/Electronics

Novel Design greatly Improves Output from Commercial Circuit Boards next to Superconducting Qubits

Green commercial circuit boards—the largest is 11.4 cm (4.5 in) by 19 cm (7.5  in)—inside a dilution refrigerator. When enclosed and pumped down, the system reaches temperatures only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Credit: NIST

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have constructed and tested a system that allows commercial electronic components—such as microprocessors on circuit boards—to operate in close proximity with ultracold devices employed in quantum information processing. That design allows 4X as much data to be output for the same number of connected wires.

In the rising excitement about quantum computing, it can be easy to overlook the physical fact that the data produced by manipulation of quantum bits (qubit...

Read More

Evidence for Exotic Magnetic Phase of Matter

Scientists identify a long-sought magnetic state predicted nearly 60 years ago. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a long-predicted magnetic state of matter called an “antiferromagnetic excitonic insulator.”

“Broadly speaking, this is a novel type of magnet,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Mark Dean, senior author on a paper describing the research just published in Nature Communications. “Since magnetic materials lie at the heart of much of the technology around us, new types of magnets are both fundamentally fascinating and promising for future applications.”

The new magnetic state involves strong magnetic attraction between electrons in a layered material that make the electrons want to arrange their magnetic moments, o...

Read More

Can Machine-Learning Models Overcome Biased Datasets?

Caption:If researchers are training a model to classify cars in images, they want the model to learn what different cars look like. But if every Ford Thunderbird in the training dataset is shown from the front, when the trained model is given an image of a Ford Thunderbird shot from the side, it may misclassify it, even if it was trained on millions of car photos.
Credits:Image courtesy of the researchers

Researchers have applied the tools of neuroscience to study when and how an artificial neural network can overcome bias in a dataset. They found that data diversity, not dataset size, is key and that the emergence of certain types of neurons during training plays a major role in how well a neural network is able to overcome dataset bias.

Artificial intelligence systems may be able t...

Read More

Graphene and an Intense Laser open the door to the extreme

 

A research team has developed a large-area suspended graphene and irradiated the thinnest graphene target with an ultra-intense laser to realize high-energy ion acceleration. Their findings will be applied to the development of compact, efficient ion accelerators used for cancer treatment, nuclear fusion and so on.

Laser-driven ion acceleration has been studied to develop a compact and efficient plasma-based accelerator, which is applicable to cancer therapy, nuclear fusion, and high energy physics...

Read More