Category Technology/Electronics

Memristor chip. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southampton

A nanoscale device, called a memristor, could be the ‘missing link’ in the development of implants that use electrical signals from the brain to help treat medical conditions. Monitoring neuronal cell activity is fundamental to neuroscience and the development of neuroprosthetics – biomedically engineered devices that are driven by neural activity. However, a persistent problem is the device being able to process the neural data in real-time, which imposes restrictive requirements on bandwidth, energy and computation capacity.

In a new study, published in Nature Communications, the researchers showed that memristors could provide real-time processing of neuronal signals (spiking events) leading to efficient data compressio...

Carbon tube (center) as a photon source and superconducting nanowires as receivers constitute part of the optical chip. Credit: W.Pernice/WWU

Whether for use in safe data encryption, ultrafast calculation of huge data volumes or so-called quantum simulation of highly complex systems: Optical quantum computers are a source of hope for tomorrow’s computer technology. For the first time, scientists now have succeeded in placing a complete quantum optical structure on a chip. This fulfills one condition for the use of photonic circuits in optical quantum computers.

The light source for the quantum photonic circuit used by the scientists for the first time were special nanotubes made of carbon...

The Scanning Tunnelling Microscope used to inject electrons into a silicon surface at the University of Birmingham. Credit: Michelle Tennison

The findings present a promising step forward towards being able to manipulate and control the behavior of high energy, or ‘hot’, electrons. A Scanning Tunnelling Microscope was used to inject electrons into a silicon surface, decorated with toluene molecules. As the injected charge propagated from the tip, it induced the molecules to react and ‘lift off’ from the surface. By measuring the precise atomic positions from which molecules departed on injection, the team were able to identify that electrons were governed by quantum mechanics close to the tip, and then by more classical behavior further away.

The team found the molecular lift-off was “su...

Generation of one-million-mode continuous-variable cluster state by unlimited time-domain multiplexing,” by Jun-ici Yoshikawa, Shota Yokoyama, Tishiyuki Kaji, Chanond Sornphiphatphong, Yu Shiozawa, Kenzo Makino and Akira Furusawa, APL Photonics, September 27, 2016, scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/app/1/6/10.1063/1.4962732.

When the quantum computer was imagined 30 years ago, it was revered for its potential to quickly and accurately complete practical tasks considered impossible for conventional computers. But, there was one big catch: Tiny-scale quantum effects fall apart too easily to be practical for reliably powering computers. Now, a team of scientists in Japan may have overcome this obstacle...