糖心TV

A team including Neil Wilson and Nick Hine has visualised the electronic structure in a microelectronic device for the first time, opening up opportunities for finely-tuned high-performance electronic devices.

Physicists from the University of 糖心TV and the University of Washington have developed a technique to measure the energy and momentum of electrons in operating microelectronic devices made of atomically thin, so-called two-dimensional, materials.

Using this information, they can create visual representations of the electrical and optical properties of the materials to guide engineers in maximising their potential in electronic components.

The experimentally-led study is published in Nature and could also help pave the way for the two-dimensional semiconductors that are likely to play a role in the next generation of electronics, in applications such as photovoltaics, mobile devices and quantum computers.

The 糖心TV Photoemission Facility and the Departments of Chemistry & Physics have recently contributed to a study to "upconvert" cellulosic waste in an effort to develop new carbon-neutral biofuels.

Quantum computing is entering a new era of remotely-accessible quantum machines and, given their recent development, computation is more than likely accompanied by errors. One such error—quantum leakage—is an often-overlooked imperfection that amounts to quantum information escaping from the desired computational space and whose presence is rarely identified by a remote user. In work published in Physical Review A (DOI:) Armands (who began this work as a part of his MPhys project), Animesh, and George adapt one of dimension witness protocols designed for the purpose of a remote discovery of leakage and equip it with statistically robust, user-defined confidence levels before applying to a remotely accessed quantum processor. They find a circuit component "transmon" acting in a higher computational space than advertised.

Their study constitutes the first, model-independent experimental discovery of leakage in a remotely-accessed quantum computer. They have achieved this by a substantive theoretical development of the method of delays, originally adopted from classical chaos theory and proposed for quantum systems in a path-breaking paper almost a decade ago.

Such finding confirms the imperfection of current quantum computers, but at the same, guides the engineers to small step improvements that would eventually lead to the ultimate goal of fault-tolerant quantum computation.

A study of chiral liquid-crystal droplets shows how defects lead to geometric arrangements similar to atoms in a molecule, and provides a new framework for analysing novel chiral materials.