Category Technology/Electronics

In a surprising discovery, an international team of researchers, led by scientists in the University of Minnesota Center for Quantum Materials, found that deformations in quantum materials that cause imperfections in the crystal structure can actually improve the material’s superconducting and electrical properties.

The groundbreaking findings could provide new insight for developing the next generation of quantum-based computing and electronic devices.

The research just appeared in Nature Materials, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Nature Publishing Group.

“Quantum materials have unusual magnetic and electrical properties that, if understood and controlled, could revolutionize virtually every aspect of society and enable highly energy-efficient electrical syst...

Moving heat around where you want it to go—adding it to houses and hairdryers, removing it from car engines and refrigerators—is one of the great challenges of engineering.

All activity generates heat, because energy escapes from everything we do. But too much can wear out batteries and electronic components—like parts in an aging laptop that runs too hot to actually sit on your lap. If you can’t get rid of heat, you’ve got a problem.

Scientists at the University of Chicago have...

Engineers have achieved a practical mechanism for ‘full-duplex nonreciprocity,’ a property in metamaterials that allows for manipulation of both incoming and reflective beams of light.

Your office wall might play a part in the next generation of wireless communications. University of Toronto Engineering researchers Professor George Eleftheriades and postdoctoral fellow Sajjad Taravati have shown how reflectors made of metamaterials can channel light to enable more wireless data to be transmitted over a single frequency.

They project that this newly realized proper...

Fumbling to find flashlights during blackouts may soon be a distant memory, as quantum computing and artificial intelligence could learn to decipher an electric grid’s problematic quirks and solve system hiccups so fast, humans may not notice.

Rather than energy grid faults turning into giant problems—such as voltage variations or widespread blackouts—blazing fast computation blended with artificial intelligence could rapidly diagnose trouble and find solutions in tiny splits of seconds, according to Cornell research forthcoming in Applied Energy (Dec. 1, 2021).

“Energy power system failures are an old problem and we are still using classic computational methods to resolve them,” said Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J...