Category Technology/Electronics

Electric currents drive all our electronic devices. The emerging field of spintronics looks to replace electric currents with what are known as spin currents. Researchers from the University of Tokyo have made a breakthrough in this area. Their discovery of the magnetic spin Hall effect could lead to low-power, high-speed and high-capacity devices. They have created sample devices which can further research into potential applications.

“Electricity lit up the world and electronics connected it,” says Professor Yoshichika Otani from the Institute for Solid State Physics. “Spintronics will be the next step forward in this procession and we can only imagine what advances it may bring.”

So wha...

Scientists have found a way to build the ‘opposite’ of a laser – a device that absorbs a specific light wave perfectly. This can be done even in complicated systems, in which waves are scattered randomly, and has many technological applications.

At TU Wien (Vienna), a method has now been developed to make use of this effect, even in very complicated systems in which light waves are randomly scattered in all directions. The method was developed in Vienna with the help of computer simulations, and confirmed by experiments in cooperation with the University of Nice. This opens up new possibilities for all technical disciplines that have to do with wave phenomena. The new method has now been published in the journal Nature.

“Every day we are de...

Scientists have developed a faster way to read information out of qubits, the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. The potential computing revolution that quantum computers have long promised is based on their weird property called superposition. Namely, qubits can take both logical states 0 and 1 simultaneously, on top of any value in between. By mastering superpositions of the whole quantum memory, quantum computers can quickly solve problems that would require too much computing time from regular computers working with simply 0s and 1s.

However, qubits are sensitive, and currently hold quantum information for less than a millisecond ...

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a fiber that combines the elasticity of rubber with the strength of a metal, resulting in a tougher material that could be incorporated into soft robotics, packaging materials or next-generation textiles.

“A good way of explaining the material is to think of rubber bands and metal wires,” says Michael Dickey, correspondin...