Monthly Archives: June 2017

Based in Detroit, Michigan, Americas capital for electric-vehicle manufacturing, Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo highlights advances right across the powertrain. From passenger and commercial vehicles to off-highway industrial vehicles, this manufacturing and engineering event showcases the latest innovations across a vast range of vehicles. Running concurrent to the exhibition is the Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Conference, which attracts technical leaders and executives from global technology companies to reveal what is driving demand, and shaping novel technologies and new innovations at the cutting edge.

The wide-ranging sessions cover performance vehicle technology transfer, technology transfer from aerospace to EV, technologies for improving efficiency and performance of H/EVs, the impact of autonomous driving features, 48V and low-voltage mild-hybrid architectures (including energy storage design considerations), electric and hybrid bus development, the commercial and vocational electric vehicle sector, P0-P4 architectures and more.

Since 2010 this dual event has experienced exponential growth achieving a sell-out exhibition and record attendance year on year, and bringing in some of the leading names as exhibitors, speakers, delegates and visitors, including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, American Airlines, Hyundai, Ford, Valeo, BorgWarner, NovaBus, Chrysler, NASA, GM and many more.

Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo is attended by industry leaders, businesspeople, technicians, consultants, and research and development professionals, all looking for greater efficiency, safety, and cost reduction.

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Telecommunications, Meet Quantum Physics - Electronics360

June 29, 2017 by Ali Sundermier A false color image of one of the researchers' samples. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, have discovered a new topological material which may enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. It is a form of computing that taps into the power of atoms and subatomic phenomena to perform calculations significantly faster than current computers and could potentially lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems.

The research, published in ACS Nano, was led by Jerome Mlack, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences, and his mentors Nina Markovic, now an associate professor at Goucher, and Marija Drndic, Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Professor of Physics at Penn. Penn grad students Gopinath Danda and Sarah Friedensen, who received an NSF fellowship for this work, and Johns Hopkins Associate Research Professor Natalia Drichko and postdoc Atikur Rahman, now an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, also contributed to the study.

The research began while Mlack was a Ph.D. candidate at Johns Hopkins. He and other researchers were working on growing and making devices out of topological insulators, a type of material that doesn't conduct current through the bulk of the material but can carry current along its surface.

As the researchers were working with these materials, one of their devices blew up, similar to what would happen with a short circuit.

"It kind of melted a little bit," Mlack said, "and what we found is that, if we measured the resistance of this melted region of one of these devices, it became superconducting. Then, when we went back and looked at what happened to the material and tried to find out what elements were in there, we only saw bismuth selenide and palladium."

When superconducting materials are cooled, they can carry a current with zero electrical resistance without losing any energy.

Topological insulators with superconducting properties have been predicted to have great potential for creating a fault-tolerant quantum computer. However, it is difficult to make good electrical contact between the topological insulator and superconductor and to scale such devices for manufacture, using current techniques. If this new material could be recreated, it could potentially overcome both of these difficulties.

In standard computing, the smallest unit of data that makes up the computer and stores information, the binary digit, or bit, can have a value of either 0, for off, or 1, for on. Quantum computing takes advantage of a phenomenon called superposition, which means that the bits, in this case called qubits, can be 0 and 1 at the same time.

A famous way of illustrating this phenomenon is a thought experiment called Schrodinger's cat. In this thought experiment, there is a cat in a box, but one doesn't know if the cat is dead or alive until the box is opened. Before the box is opened, the cat can be considered both alive and dead, existing in two states at once, but, immediately upon opening the box, the cat's state, or in the case of qubits, the system's configuration, collapses into one: the cat is either alive or dead and the qubit is either 0 or 1.

"The idea is to encode information using these quantum states," Markovic said, "but in order to use it in needs to be encoded and exist long enough for you to read."

One of the major problems in the field of quantum computing is that the qubits are not very stable and it's very easy to destroy the quantum states. These topological materials provide a way of making these states live long enough for to read them off and do something with them, Markovic said.

"It's kind of like if the box in Schrodinger's cat were on the top of a flag pole and the slightest wind could just knock it off," Mlack said. "The idea is that these topological materials at least widen the diameter of the flag pole so the box is sitting on more a column than a flag pole. You can knock it off eventually, but it's otherwise very hard to break the box and find out what happened to the cat."

Although their initial discovery of this material was an accident, they were able to come up with a process to recreate it in a controlled way.

Markovic, who was Mlack's advisor at Johns Hopkins at the time, suggested that, in order to recreate it without having to continually blow up devices, they could thermally anneal it, a process in which they put it into a furnace and heat it to a certain temperature.

Using this method, the researchers wrote, "the metal directly enters the nanostructure, providing good electrical contact and can be easily patterned into the nanostructure using standard lithography, allowing for easy scalability of custom superconducting circuits in a topological insulator."

Although researchers already have the capability of making a superconducting topological material, there's a huge problem in the fact that, when they put two materials together, there's a crack in between, which decreases the electrical contact. This ruins the measurements that they can make as well as the physical phenomena that could lead to making devices that will allow for quantum computing.

By patterning it directly into the crystal, the superconductor is embedded, and there are none of these contact problems. The resistance is very low, and they can pattern devices for quantum computing in one single crystal.

To test the material's superconducting properties, they put it in two extremely cold refrigerators, one of which cools down to nearly absolute zero. They also swept a magnetic field across it, which would kill the superconductivity and the topological nature of the material, to find out the limitations of the material. They also did standard electrical measurements, running a current through and looking at the voltage that is created.

"I think what is also nice in this paper is the combination of the electrical transport performance and the direct insights from the actual device materials characterization," Drndic said. "We have good insights on the composition of these devices to support all these claims because we did elemental analysis to understand how these two materials join."

One of the benefits of the researchers' device is that it's potentially scalable, capable of fitting onto a chip similar to the ones currently in our computers.

"Right now the main advances in quantum computing involve very complicated lithography methods," Drndic said. "People are doing it with nanowires which are connected to these circuits. If you have single nanowires that are very, very tiny and then you have to put them in particular places, it's very difficult. Most of the people who are on the forefront of this research have multimillion-dollar facilities and lots of people behind them. But this, in principle, we can do in one lab. It allows for making these devices in a simple way. You can just go and write your device any way you want it to be."

According to Mlack, though there is still a fair amount of limitation on it; there's an entire field that has sprouted up devoted to coming up with new and interesting ways to try to leverage these quantum states and quantum information. If successful, quantum computing will allow for a number of things.

"It will allow for much faster decryption and encryption of information," he said, "which is why some of the big defense contractors in the NSA, as well as companies like Microsoft, are interested in it. It will also allow us to model quantum systems in a reasonable amount of time and is capable of doing certain calculations and simulations faster than one would typically be able to do."

It's particularly good for completely different kinds of problems, such as problems that require massive parallel computations, Markovic said. If you need to do lots of things at once, quantum computing speeds things up tremendously.

"There are problems right now that would take the age of the universe to compute," she said.

"With quantum computing, you'd be able to do it in minutes." This could potentially also lead to advances in drug development and other complex systems, as well as enable new technologies.

The researchers hope to start building some more advanced devices that are geared towards actually building a qubit out of the systems that they have, as well as trying out different metals to see if they can change the properties of the material.

"It really is a new potential way of fabricating these devices that no one has done before," Mlack said. "In general, when people make some of these materials by combining this topological material and superconductivity, it is a bulk crystal, so you don't really control where everything is. Here we can actually customize the pattern that we're making into the material itself. That's the most exciting part, especially when we start talking about adding in different types of metals that give it different characteristics, whether those be ferromagnetic materials or elements that might make it more insulating. We still have to see if it works, but there's a potential for creating these interesting customized circuits directly into the material."

Explore further: Group works toward devising topological superconductor

More information: Jerome T. Mlack et al, Patterning Superconductivity in a Topological Insulator, ACS Nano (2017). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b01549

The experimental realization of ultrathin graphene - which earned two scientists from Cambridge the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 - has ushered in a new age in materials research.

The 'quantized magneto-electric effect' has been demonstrated for the first time in topological insulators at TU Wien, which is set to open up new and highly accurate methods of measurement.

University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.

The global race towards a functioning quantum computer is on. With future quantum computers, we will be able to solve previously impossible problems and develop, for example, complex medicines, fertilizers, or artificial ...

Researchers have shown how to create a rechargeable "spin battery" made out of materials called topological insulators, a step toward building new spintronic devices and quantum computers.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, physicists report the first ever observation of heat conductance in a material containing anyons, quantum quasiparticles that exist in two-dimensional systems.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College, have discovered a new topological material which may enable fault-tolerant quantum computing. It is a form ...

By measuring the random jiggling motion of electrons in a resistor, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have contributed to accurate new measurements of the Boltzmann constant, a fundamental ...

Van der Waals interactions between molecules are among the most important forces in biology, physics, and chemistry, as they determine the properties and physical behavior of many materials. For a long time, it was considered ...

For surfers, finding the "sweet spot," the most powerful part of the wave, is part of the thrill and the challenge.

With leading corporations now investing in highly expensive and complex infrastructures to unleash the power of quantum technologies, INRS researchers have achieved a breakthrough in a light-weight photonic system created ...

The technological future of everything from cars and jet engines to oil rigs, along with the gadgets, appliances and public utilities comprising the internet of things, will depend on microscopic sensors.

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New method could enable more stable and scalable quantum computing, physicists report - Phys.Org

There are many popular memes on the Internet that have to do with differing perceptions.

They have multiple photos captioned: What I think I do; What my friends think I do; What my mother thinks I do; and, finally, What I really do.

The pictures usually show wildly differing perceptions of the same job. This also appears to be the case with science. There is often a vast gulf between what people think about science and what it truly is.

Most people tend to think of science as the queen of the intellectual disciplines - always sure and precise, having all the answers to any conceivable question. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Even science itself recognized this as truth with the division between theoretical and practical sciences.

If science is the queen of intellectual disciplines, Physics is the king of science. It is the fundamental investigation into how the world around us works. It includes chemistry, biology, mechanics and just about anything else you can think of. Physics stands astride of science like a Colossus, proud, sure and confident. But this is only a faade. There is a fundamental contradiction inside physics that has defied explanation for the past 100 years. And we are, even now, only beginning to glimpse some faint ideas about how this contradiction can be resolved.

In physics, there are two theories that form the basis for our understanding of the universe. Quantum physics that has explained how matter is constructed and why it behaves the way that it does. Most nuclear physics deals almost exclusively with quantum physics.

On the other end of the spectrum of physics knowledge is relativity. One man, Albert Einstein, whose very name has become another way of saying genius, was responsible for this wonderful theory that is master of everything large. It deals with the structure of the universe, the nature of gravity and explains space and time. It is a theory that has stood every test that has been put to it and it has never failed to produce the expected results or even a slight deviation from the expected results.

Both quantum theory and relativity are two of the most successful theories that we have ever had. The problem is that they don't play well together. That's right, two theories that are as close to reality as we have ever come are not compatible with each other. Doesn't make sense, does it? When you try to apply relativity to the very small scales of the atomic realm, suddenly the mathematics does not make sense any more. Quantities become infinite and predictions go wildly astray.

How is this possible?

If I could answer that question, I would be preparing my speech for my Nobel Prize ceremony. The thing that makes this amazing is that each theory is so close to describing reality that it is almost inconceivable that it could be incorrect. If either or, indeed, both theories are wrong, it will bring about a complete revolution in our understanding of reality.

Some years ago, I visited CERN in Geneva just a couple of months before its discovery of the Higgs particle that controls the mass of matter. CERN is the world's largest scientific apparatus and is designed to smash atoms together at almost the speed of light and then analyze the pieces to understand how matter works. I managed to have lunch in the cafeteria there with some of the scientists working on this marvellous machine. Sitting not too far away were at least two Nobel Prize winners who were doing work at CERN.

The conversation took an interesting turn when I asked them what would happen if the machine did not find evidence of the Higgs particle. The fellow I was talking to got a faraway look in his eyes and said; "Then physics would become very interesting. Something unexpected means that we don't understand it all and we would have to become very creative to figure out what is going on because everything else fits our current theories."

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman agreed with this assessment when he said that physics required a great deal of imagination, but imagination in a straitjacket. This means that you cannot imagine anything you like. What you theorize must also conform to everything we already know. In other words, any new theory must not only explain the new phenomena, but must still provide an explanation for all the old phenomena as well, or, at the very least, not be incompatible with what we observe.

This is the situation for modern physics. We have two incredibly detailed and effective theories of how various parts of nature work, and they are not compatible.

It would seem that physics is indeed "interesting again."

Tim Philp has enjoyed science since he was old enough to read. Having worked in technical fields all his life, he shares his love of science with readers weekly. He can be reached by e-mail at: tphilp@bfree.on.ca or via snail mail c/o The Expositor.

Brantford Expositor 2017

Original post:

Why can't quantum theory and relativity get along? - Brantford Expositor

In nature, change is constant and inevitable. It is also fairly slow and mainly evolutionary. At the macro level, everything looks very logical, guided by the basic scientific laws of physics, chemistry and biology. We are comfortable with changes that we can observe and measure. We feel that we are in full control of predicting future movements, through elegant mathematical modeling and good enough approximations. The world of macro physics is full of order that is guided by clear scientific standards.

By digging deeper into the area of subatomic particles and quantum physics, things start to look blurry, counter-intuitive and completely unexpected. Old silos of physics, chemistry and biology, as distinct scientific disciplines, start to disappear. We cant clearly observe and freely measure any process, without danger of ruining and completely skewing the results of the very same measurement. We feel amazed and fascinated by the apparent chaos, but also confused and often scared by our inability to comprehend and predict whats next. Thats the domain reserved only for the fearless and most curious minds. Imagination and intuition rule this world, without clear standards and without obvious order.

The physics reality of payments

In the world of payments, I see similar patterns. The traditional payments are ruled by established standards and are protected by clear rules, regulations and relatively high barriers to entry. These sometimes rigid Newtonian laws of payments industry were established over several decades by payment networks like Visa, Mastercard, etc. Traditional FIs feel very comfortable here since they know how to play by the rules and they excel at it. Thats why we enjoy pretty good safety and security of in-store payments today. The standards like EMV, ISO 8583, ISO 20022, PCI DSS are just some of the examples illustrating the point. However, today some of these standards (not all) start to feel old and somewhat inefficient in dealing with some of the demands of the modern payments trends.

On the other hand, in the payments innovation space, we feel like operating inside the subatomic world and space of the payment industry. Similar to the world of quantum physics, frequently, there are no clear rules, and imagination and intuition are often required to be relied on in order to invent and launch new services and products. Disruption of the old business models is ultimately at stake. The new business models are often not easily understood by payment traditionalists. As such, the payments innovation space is opportunistic and exciting, wide open for creative players, but at the same time, it is full of risks for potential investors and incumbents, which are faced with the inability to clearly distinguish winners from losers early enough.

Take online payments as an example there is no clear standard here. It represented the Wild West of the payments industry in the last couple of decades. It is a space that is still filled with significant security risks and friction. Agile and nimble FinTechs may thrive in such an environment, feeling free to experiment, unbound by any of the regulations and unconstrained by a traditionalist mindset. No wonder that incumbent FIs together with Visa and Mastercard have been somewhat marginal players here, despite their ability to rule the world of physical POS payment rails for over half a century now.

Blockchain is an even better example of the financial industrys quantum world. It feels directionless, void of any clear standards and rules, combined with quirky and muddy explanations of underlying consensus-reaching algorithms. It is a fertile ground for buzzwords and skilled snake oil type salesmen, further amplifying the inherent sense of confusion and unpredictability. Despite all of the hype and attention, however, blockchains disruptive potential has not been realized in real life so far. Key questions still galore: which blockchain platform to choose? Are the empirics behind the various consensus recipes trustworthy enough and mathematically provable? How do we deal with inherent scalability challenges for real-time payments? The quest for suitable use cases still continues, but it is starting to feel like we are quickly approaching the point where the whole blockchain movement may need to detach itself from the original (traditionalist) route and creatively explore some of the unusual paths and back roads, to be able to deliver promised breakthrough innovations.

It should be obvious by now, that the two worlds of payments traditional and innovation are not compatible. How do we move forward then?

What can be done?

Lets go back to the physics field for potential inspiration and guidance. Physicists clearly recognized the chasm and impedance mismatch between traditional and quantum science and are patiently working together to bridge the incompatible views. The relentless pursuit of the (still elusive) theory of everything in physics is underway, with many colliding theories in existence, but with everybody marching toward the same important goal here. Physicists on all sides of the scientific spectrum clearly understand the need for healthy open-minded collaboration toward final convergence and harmonization of all of their existing incompatible views. Although it may not be obvious, they are in my opinion perfect example of agile innovators, not afraid to try any promising theory, challenge it and pivot if required or adopt and build on it. They are also brutal realists, well aware that their goal of ultimate convergence can only be enabled by solid standardization along the way.

Now, back to payments again. The good news is that standardization in the payments space is not limited, in any way, by our ability to understand unpredictable laws of the subatomic world, but purely by the willingness of all involved players to systematically collaborate and create necessary standards that enable progress. Nimble and agile FinTechs may feel they are more adept to play in chaotic innovation space, but it is in their best interest to realize as soon as possible that they shall enable their offerings for easy integration with the incumbents, in order to be seriously considered as future partners. Incumbents, on the other hand, must realize that they cant keep protecting their current business models forever, and shall become open-minded toward emerging payment innovations.

In online payments, for example, the upcoming W3C Payment Request and W3C Payment App standard APIs will enable direct communication between online merchants and the providers of online payment app browser plug-ins. Will both merchants and FIs recognize the potential of this standard and seize this opportunity? It can clearly give innovative FIs a chance to painlessly establish themselves as natural online payment providers for their current customers. It also enables merchants to integrate only with 1 standard API for initiation of online payments and thus eliminate the need for multiple Pay With buttons on their checkout pages, each involving costly integration with a different set of APIs today. This is a huge opportunity and a clear candidate for theory of everything in the field of online payments. The process of online payment space standardization may likely expose PayPal as obsolete and unnecessary, after several decades of ruling the same space. Since this clearly benefits online merchants and FIs, I hope they will start collaborating intensely in 2017.

In the blockchain space, FinTechs must recognize that lack of standards, lack of clarity on the underlying consensus mechanisms and lack of scalability for real-time payments seriously impedes the adoption of their incompatible platforms. In my opinion, the set of common industry-standard APIs for blockchain is long overdue and initiating work must be the next biggest priority for the blockchain community in 2017. Why not again use W3C as a natural and neutral facilitator for this standardization? One day, the FIs should ultimately be able to experiment efficiently by plugging in blockchain platform A, then plug in blockchain platform B, in order to evaluate and compare, without the need to completely rewrite their application code. Further, the required scalability for real-time payments is hard to deliver elegantly using any of the current blockchain platforms. Here, openness to new ideas which might be radically different than the current mainstream thinking is clearly needed.

Will future deliver tangible solutions for some of these challenges? No crystal ball here, but I personally feel pumped up and am enthusiastically looking forward to our collective quest for the much needed theory of everything and standardization for every amazing sub-field of payments.

Read more:

Payments Innovation - A Quantum World Of Payments - Finextra (blog)