Lifeboat Foundation

In today’s world of digital information, an enormous amount of data is exchanged and stored on a daily basis.

In the 1980s, IBM unveiled the first hard drive—which was the size of a refrigerator—that could store 1 GB of data, but now we have memory devices that have a thousand-fold greater data-storage capacity and can easily fit in the palm of our hand. If the current pace of increase in digital information is any indication, we require yet newer data recording systems that are lighter, have low environmental impact, and, most importantly, have higher data storage density.

Recently, a new class of materials called axially polar-ferroelectric columnar liquid crystals (AP-FCLCs) has emerged as a candidate for future high-density memory storage materials. An AP-FCLC is a liquid crystal with a structure of parallel columns generated by molecular self-assembly, which have polarization along the column axis.

Some of our most important everyday items, such as computers, medical equipment, stereos, generators, and more, work because of magnets. We know what happens when computers become more powerful, but what might be possible if magnets became more versatile? What if one could change a physical property that defined their usability? What innovation might that catalyze?

It’s a question that MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) research scientists Hang Chi, Yunbo Ou, Jagadeesh Moodera, and their co-authors explore in a new, open-access Nature Communications paper, “Strain-tunable Berry curvature in quasi-two-dimensional chromium telluride.”

Understanding the magnitude of the authors’ discovery requires a brief trip back in time: In 1,879, a 23-year-old graduate student named Edwin Hall discovered that when he put a magnet at right angles to a strip of metal that had a current running through it, one side of the strip would have a greater charge than the other. The magnetic field was deflecting the current’s electrons toward the edge of the metal, a phenomenon that would be named the Hall effect in his honor.

Scaling has long been recognized as a major hurdle for quantum processors, along with a need for advances in quantum error correction and the control of quantum gates.

However, while rapid progress has been made in the latter two, far less progress has been made in the development of a CMOS-based scalable system, where the devices and qubits are sufficiently identical that the number of external control signals increases slowly with the number of qubits.

Therefore the development, and taping-out, of a CMOS-based scaling architecture has taken on new significance, as scaling has become the most critical remaining task for building a commercially viable quantum computer.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are now widely used. For use in displays, blue OLEDs are additionally required to supplement the primary colors red and green. Especially in blue OLEDs, impurities give rise to strong electrical losses, which could be partly circumvented by using highly complex and expensive device layouts. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now developed a new material concept that potentially allows efficient blue OLEDs with a strongly simplified structure.

From televisions to smartphones: organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are nowadays finding their way into many devices that we use every day. To display an image, they are needed in the three primary colors red, green and blue. In particular, light-emitting diodes for blue light are still difficult to manufacture because blue light—physically spoken—has a high energy, which makes the development of materials difficult.

Especially the presence of minute quantities of impurities in the material that cannot be removed plays a decisive role in the performance of these materials. These impurities— oxygen molecules, for example—form obstacles for electrons to move inside the diode and participate in the light-generation process. When an electron is captured by such an obstacle, its energy is not converted into light but into heat. This problem, known as “charge trapping”, occurs primarily in blue OLEDs and significantly reduces their efficiency.

When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy. These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.

Similar to the photons that make up beams of light, indivisible quantum particles called phonons make up a beam of sound. These particles emerge from the collective motion of quadrillions of atoms, much as a “stadium wave” in a sports arena is due to the motion of thousands of individual fans. When you listen to a song, you’re hearing a stream of these very small quantum particles.

Researchers have created a quantum superposition state in a semiconductor nanostructure that might serve as a basis for quantum computing. The trick: two optical laser pulses that act as a single terahertz laser pulse.

A German-Chinese research team has successfully created a quantum bit in a semiconductor nanostructure. Using a special energy transition, the researchers created a superposition state in a quantum dot—a tiny area of the semiconductor—in which an electron hole simultaneously possessed two different energy levels. Such superposition states are fundamental for quantum computing.

However, excitation of the state would require a large-scale free-electron laser that can emit light in the terahertz range. Additionally, this wavelength is too long to focus the beam on the tiny quantum dot. The German-Chinese team has now achieved the excitation with two finely tuned short-wavelength optical laser pulses.

For decades, scientists have been probing the potential of two-dimensional materials to transform our world. 2D materials are only a single layer of atoms thick. Within them, subatomic particles like electrons can only move in two dimensions. This simple restriction can trigger unusual electron behavior, imbuing the materials with “exotic” properties like bizarre forms of magnetism, superconductivity and other collective behaviors among electrons—all of which could be useful in computing, communication, energy and other fields.

But researchers have generally assumed that these exotic 2D properties exist only in single-layer sheets, or short stacks. The so-called “bulk” versions of these materials—with their more complex 3D atomic structures—should behave differently.

Or so they thought.

The semiconductor industry warned that there won’t be enough engineers, computer scientists and technicians in the US to support a rapid expansion this decade, threatening efforts to boost the domestic chip economy.

A scalable system for controlling quantum bits demonstrates a very low error rate, which is essential for making practical devices.

A major obstacle to the development of practical quantum computers is the difficulty of scaling up—making a device with large numbers of quantum bits (qubits) that also gives accurate results in the presence of environmental noise. Now researchers report a significant improvement in the accuracy of a technology that is already known to be much easier to scale up than conventional techniques [1]. This alternative technology uses units of magnetic flux called flux quanta to control conventional superconducting qubits. The reduction in the error rate came from physically separating the control circuits from the qubits. With further refinement, the flux-quanta technology could provide a superior pathway to practical quantum computation.

Many current efforts to carry out quantum logic operations—the basic units of computation—use short microwave pulses to control the qubits. Currently, however, this technology is difficult to scale up beyond 1,000 qubits. But the presence of environmental noise requires error-correction methods that rely on large numbers of qubits, perhaps a million or more, for an effective error-correcting system that performs useful computations, according to some estimates.