Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: computing – Page 285

Researchers at Leipzig University have developed a highly efficient method to investigate systems with long-range interactions that were previously puzzling to experts. These systems can be gases or even solid materials such as magnets whose atoms interact not only with their neighbors but also far beyond.

Professor Wolfhard Janke and his team of researchers use Monte Carlo for this purpose. This stochastic process, named after the Monte Carlo casino, generates random system states from which the desired properties of the system can be determined. In this way, Monte Carlo simulations provide deep insights into the physics of phase transitions.

The researchers have developed a that can perform these simulations in a matter of days, which would have taken centuries using conventional methods. They have published their new findings in the journal Physical Review X.

Read more | >

Carbon nanotubes, large cylindrical molecules composed of hybridized carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal structure, recently attracted significant attention among electronics engineers. Due to their geometric configuration and advantageous electronic properties, these unique molecules could be used to create smaller field-effect transistors (FETs) that exhibit high energy efficiencies.

FETs based on carbon nanotubes have the potential to outperform smaller transistors based on silicon, yet their advantage in real-world implementations has yet to be conclusively demonstrated. A recent paper by researchers at Peking University and other institutes in China, published in Nature Electronics, outlines the realization of FETs based on carbon nanotubes that can be scaled to the same size of a 10 nm silicon technology node.

“Recent progress in achieving wafer-scale high density semiconducting carbon nanotube arrays brough us one step closer to the practical use of carbon nanotubes in CMOS circuits,” Zhiyong Zhang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, previous research efforts have mainly focused on the scaling of channel or gate length of carbon nanotube transistors while keeping large contact dimensions, which cannot be accepted for high density CMOS circuits in practical applications.

Read more | >

Adopting a curious mindset over a high-pressure one can enhance memory, according to recent research from Duke University. The study showed that participants who envisioned themselves as a thief planning a heist in a virtual art museum demonstrated better recall of the paintings they encountered than those who imagined executing the heist on the spot while playing the same computer game.

The slight variation in motivations — the urgent need to achieve immediate goals versus the curious exploration for future objectives — could have significant implications in real-life scenarios. These include incentivizing people to receive a vaccine, prompting action against climate change, and potentially providing new treatments for psychiatric conditions.

The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more | >

Humans have a distinctive skeleton, and are the only bipedal great apes (the great ape species are bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans). While the evolution of the human skeleton enabled us to walk upright, it also led to the rise of musculoskeletal disease. It’s thought that cognitive development began to accelerate in humans once we started to move around, adapt to new environments, and make use of tools. Researchers have now used advanced computational tools and a trove of human genetic data in the UK Biobank to outline the genetic changes that occurred as primates started to walk upright for the first time.

These findings, which were reported in Science, have suggested that natural selection had a strong influence on the genetic changes that altered our anatomy, and gave early humans an evolutionary leg up.

Read more | >

Transparent and flexible displays, which have received a lot of attention in various fields including automobile displays, bio–health care, military, and fashion, are in fact known to break easily when experiencing small deformations. To solve this problem, active research is being conducted on many transparent and flexible conductive materials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, silver nanowires, and conductive polymers.

A joint research team led by Professor Kyung Cheol Choi from the KAIST School of Electrical Engineering and Dr. Yonghee Lee from the National Nano Fab Center (NNFC) announced the successful development of a water-resistant, transparent, and flexible OLED using MXene nanotechnology. The material can emit and transmit light even when exposed to water.

This research was published as a front cover story of ACS Nano under the title “Highly Air-Stable, Flexible, and Water-Resistive 2D Titanium Carbide MXene-Based RGB Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays for Transparent Free-Form Electronics.”

Read more | >

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 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 , which have polarization along the column axis.

Read more | >

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 was deflecting the current’s electrons toward the edge of the metal, a phenomenon that would be named the Hall effect in his honor.

Read more | >

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.

Read more | >

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: (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, for are still difficult to manufacture because blue light—physically spoken—has a , 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— , 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.

Read more | >