Category Technology/Electronics

In 1959 Richard Feynman, in his talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” spoke of a future in which tiny machines could perform huge feats. Like many forward-looking concepts, his molecule and atom-sized world remained for years in the realm of science fiction. And then, scientists and other creative thinkers began to realize Feynman’s nanotechnological visions. In the spirit of Feynman’s insight engineers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a design for a functional nanoscale computing device. The concept involves a dense, 3D circuit operating on an unconventional type of logic that could, theoretically, be packed into a block no bigger than 50 nm on any side.

Key to this devel...

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An electric current will not only heat a hybrid metamaterial, but will also trigger it to change state and fade into the background like a chameleon in what may be the proof-of-concept of the first controllable metamaterial device, or metadevice. “Previous metamaterials work focused mainly on cloaking objects so they were invisible in the radio frequency or other specific frequencies,” said Douglas H. Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of electrical engineering, Penn State...

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Physicists at ANU and UQ have produced near-perfect clones of quantum information using a new method to surpass previous cloning limits. A global race is on to use quantum physics for ultra-secure encryption over long distances according to Prof Ping Koy Lam, node director of ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) at ANU. The new cloning method uses high performance optical amplifiers to clone light encoded with quantum information – it is possible this technique could allow quantum encryption to be implemented with existing fibre optic infrastructure.

“One obstacle to sending quantum information is that the quantum state degrades before reaching its destination...

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Counterintuitive ‘metamaterial’ may enable heat-resistant circuit boards. Almost all solid materials, from rubber and glass to granite and steel, inevitably expand when heated. Only in very rare instances do certain materials buck this thermodynamic trend and shrink with heat. Eg, cold water will contract when heated 0 – 4C, before expanding. Engineers from MIT, the University of Southern California, and elsewhere are now adding to this curious class of heat-shrinking materials...

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