Category Technology/Electronics

Researchers build a Heat Shield just 10 Atoms Thick to Protect Electronic Devices

This greatly magnified image shows four layers of atomically thin materials that form a heat-shield just two to three nanometers thick, or roughly 50,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper. Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology

Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode. To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users.

Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically thin materials, stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can...

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Newfound Superconductor material could be the ‘Silicon of Quantum Computers’

A cartoon of two islands in a blue sea. Each island has mountains and explorers. At bottom are clouds and a pot of gold.
We have already found lots of superconductors, but this whimsical illustration shows why one superconductor’s newfound properties may make it especially useful. Most known superconductors are spin singlets, found on the island to the left. Uranium ditelluride, however, is a rare spin triplet, found on the island to the right, and also exists at the top of a mountain representing its unusually high resistance to magnetic fields. These properties may make it a good material for making qubits, which could maintain coherence in a quantum computer despite interference from the surrounding environment.
Credit: N. Hanacek/NIST

Possible ‘topological superconductor’ could overcome industry’s problem of quantum decoherence...

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Researchers use Blockchain to Drive Electric-Vehicle Infrastructure

An electric vehicle at a charging station.
Mitigating Trust Issues in Electric Vehicle Charging using a Blockchaine-Energy ’19 Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems, 2019; DOI: 10.1145/3307772.3328283

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have integrated the use of blockchain into energy systems, a development that could result in expanded charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. In a study that outlines the new blockchain-oriented charging system, the researchers found that there is a lack of trust among charging service providers, property owners and owners of electric vehicles (EVs).

With an open blockchain platform, all parties will have access to the data and can see if it has been tampered with...

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Schrödinger’s Cat with 20 Qubits

Experimental sketch: Rubidium atoms are captured by laser beams (red). Another additional laser (blue) excites about half of the atoms to such an extent that their atomic shells merge with the adjacent atoms.
Copyright: Forschungszentrum Jülich / Tobias Schlößer

New record with entangled quantum bits. Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning – in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger’s cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers.

Since the ea...

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