physics tagged posts

The hidden physics complicating interstellar lightsails

Concept art of a diffractive solar sail. Credit - NASA / Grover Swartzlander
Concept art of a diffractive solar sail. Credit – NASA / Grover Swartzlander

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar mission concepts. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies.

However, according to a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light, they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.

The paper ...

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Self-supervised AI Learns Physics to Reconstruct Microscopic Images from Holograms

GedankenNet 2
Ozcan Research Lab/UCLA
Images showing the training and testing of UCLA-developed AI-powered GedankenNet using simulated holograms generated from random images in reconstructing microscopic images of various human tissue sections and Pap smears. Scale bar: 50 μm (millionth of a meter)

Advance uses thought experiments, instead of real data, to expedite learning. Researchers from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have unveiled an artificial intelligence-based model for computational imaging and microscopy without training with experimental objects or real data.

In a recent paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, UCLA’s Volgenau Professor for Engineering Innovation Aydogan Ozcan and his research team introduced a self-supervised AI model nicknamed GedankenNet that learns f...

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