Science Daily picks for Today
Peeling Away Layers Of Dense Liquid Flow Dynamics
Standard microscopy and visible light imaging techniques cannot peer into the dark and murky centers of dense-liquid jets [...] Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a technique to peer through high-speed dense liquids using high-energy X-rays from Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS).
[...] new technique has the ability to examine the internal structure of materials at high speed, and is sensitive to boundaries. Multiphase flows, such as high-speed jets or bubbles in a stream of water, are ideal systems to study with this technique.
Special Coating Greatly Improves Solar Cell Performance
A team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new anode coating strategy that significantly enhances the efficiency of solar energy power conversion. [...] Such technology would greatly reduce our dependence on burning fossil fuels for electricity production as well as reduce the combustion product: carbon dioxide, a global warming greenhouse gas.
Cheap, Clean Drinking Water Purified Through Nanotechnology
[...] researchers have investigated how silica particles can be coated easily with a nanometer-thin layer of active material based on a hydrocarbon with a silicon-containing anchor. The coating is formed through a chemical self-assembly process so involves nothing more than stirring the ingredients to make the active particles.
These active particles, so called Surface Engineered Silica (SES), were then tested to demonstrate that they could remove biological molecules, pathogens such as viruses like the Polio virus, bacteria like Escherichia coli, and Cryptosporidium parvum, which is a waterborne parasite.
Analogue Logic For Quantum Computing
a new type of quantum information processing [...] using continuous variables instead of 1s and 0s [...] might work very well in quantum computing.
[...] Unlike qubits, where one atom or particle carries the information, continuous variables (CV) use an ensemble of atoms or photons to carry the information – the first with matter and the second with light.
Both digital and analogue approaches to quantum information science use the peculiar properties of quantum particles as the ‘signifier’ of the information carried, such as the spin of a single electron or the polarisation of a photon for qubits, or the analogue properties of a group of electrons or photons for CV.
It is the collective property of this group of electrons, or photons, that becomes the information carrier in CV. When you have this many particles you can call it continuous even though there are many very small steps in the information-encoding variable
