Research

Oxford Ionics has delivered its quantum computer, ‘Quartet’, to the UK National Quantum Computer Centre in Oxfordshire – a centre that has ordered a number of quantum computers. Quartet is a trapped-ion quantum computer which shuns laser control in favour of electronic control for its qubits. “This approach has yielded the highest performing quantum platform in the world, with Oxford ...

GuRu Wireless has announced a mm-wave phased array with over 70,000 transmitters, intended to transmit power wirelessly to persistent drones. “Our current transmitter can deliver over a kilowatt of continuous power at distances exceeding 100 meters,” said company co-founder and CTO Behrooz Abiri. “For persistent operations, the system must be capable of delivering at least 500W to an aerial vehicle ...

Seoul National University has developed a cuff-less wearable blood pressure monitor. “Unlike conventional cuff-based blood pressure monitors that use an inflatable air bladder to apply pressure to the arm, this continuously measures blood pressure with a compact flexible electronic patch,” according to the university. It infers blood pressure based on time-of-arrival difference between the electrical signal caused by the heart ...

Gallium nitride transistors rely on a ‘two-dimensional electron gas’ for their high speed – a flat heterojunction between GaN and AlGaN where electrons can move extremely quickly – they are ‘high electron mobility transistors’ – hemts – rather than mosfets (Ed: despite what some manufactures call them). Scandium aluminum nitride (ScAlN) is a novel material that could make these transistors ...

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are breaking technical barriers with faster circuit breakers to enable and protect the modern electric grid. The ORNL team developed medium-voltage circuit breakers capable of handling increasing levels of DC at a lower cost, an advance that can help reduce future electricity costs and expand capacity in an ...

Improved battery electrolytes or more cost-effective solar panels are two possibilities from research at MIT which automates the search for polymer blends that create materials with chosen properties, according to the university. Computer power alone was not enough to design successful mixtures, but neither was the brute-force approach of physically testing every possible combination. Instead, a computer algorithm was linked ...

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have created a stick-on, thin, flexible, stretchy electrode array that can pick up EEG signals from the brain, which are around 10-times smaller than ECG signals from the heart. On to this is mounted an electronics package that extracts and wirelessly transmits the acquired signals. “Unlike EEG caps that are bulky with ...

The University of California Santa Barbara has improved the integration of monolithic III-V lasers on silicon substrates. What has emerged from the research are narrow-band well-behaved lasers that are compatible with mass manufacturing. “The lasers operate efficiently on a single O-band wavelength,” according to the IEEE Photonics Society, which has published the projects findings. “O-band is desirable as it allows ...

Researchers at the Tokyo University of Science have solved one of the (many) sodium ion battery challenges, and discovered why the associated material works so well. The material is β-NaMnO2, a layered form of sodium manganese oxide, proposed as an electrode material for sodium ions to shuttle in and out of. If it was well behaved, β-NaMnO2 would feature corrugated ...

A team from Laval University in Quebec has sent 1Tbit/s down an optical fibre used micro ring resonators on silicon to modulate the data. “Unlike traditional systems that exploit only light intensity, this chip also uses the phase,” according to the university. “We go from a speed of 56Gbit/s to 1,000Gbit/s,” said researcher Alireza Geravand (pictured), who studies in the ...