News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Scientists from Australia have set a world record for the most stable transmission of a laser signal through the atmosphere. The team combined Aussie 'phase stabilisation' technology with advanced self-guiding optical terminals to 'effectively eliminate atmospheric turbulence,' an advance which could help test Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have miniaturized the optical components required to cool atoms down to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, the first step in employing them on microchips to drive a new generation of super-accurate atomic clocks, enable navigation without GPS, and simulate quantum systems.

As reported in Advanced Photonics, researchers from the University of Freiburg, Germany, have made a significant advance in AO microscopy through the demonstration of a new AO module comprising two deformable phase plates (DPPs).

Tsukuba University scientists create movies of the ultrafast motion of electrons traveling through an organic semiconductor with atomic-level resolution. This work may lead to more powerful and miniaturized smart devices.

The 3D-NAND is the most commercially successful 3D memory device today, and its demand is growing exponentially. As each layer thickness corresponds to the effective channel length, accurate characterization and control of layer-by-layer thickness is critical. Engineers in South Korea invented a nondestructive thickness characterization method of each layer in semiconductor multilayer stacks with more than 200 layers used for 3D-NAND. The method will provide new ways for total inspection in 3D semiconductor device manufacturing.

The fabrication of shape-memory hydrogel scaffolds not only requires biocompatibility, micrometre resolution, high mechanical strength, but also requires a low polymerisation threshold in high-water content environment to incorporate microstructures with biological tissues. Towards this goal, scientists from China and australite developed a new hydrogel formula that full fills this goal and demonstrated water-responsive structures with a shape-memory effect at a micrometre scale. This work is of importance for the development future reversible microdevices in biomedical engineering.

Hard X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have delivered intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses for over a decade. One of the most promising applications of XFELs is in biology, where researchers can capture images down to the atomic scale even before the radiation damage destroys the sample. In physics and chemistry, these X-rays can also shed light on the fastest processes occurring in nature with a shutter speed lasting only one femtosecond - equivalent to a millionth of a billionth of a second.

Photonic topological insulators are currently at the forefront of on-chip photonic research due to their potential for loss-free information transport. Realized in photonic crystals, they enable robust propagation of optical states along domain walls. But how robust is robust? In order to answer this, researchers from TU Delft and AMOLF in the Netherlands quantified photonic edge state transport using phase-resolved near-field optical microscopy. The findings provide a crucial step towards error-free integrated photonic quantum networks