The Sun’s Electric Field Has Been Probed

Researchers measured the flow of electrons streaming from the sun as the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft made its closest approach to date to our home star.

From:  University of Iowa

July 14, 2021 -- As the Parker Solar Probe ventures closer to the sun, we are learning new things about our home star.

In a new study, physicists led by the University of Iowa report the first definitive measurements of the sun's electric field, and how the electric field interacts with the solar wind, the fast-flowing current of charged particles that can affect activities on Earth, from satellites to telecommunications.

The physicists calculated the distribution of electrons within the sun's electric field, a feat made possible by the fact that the Parker Solar Probe jetted within 0.1 astronomical units (AU), or a mere 9 million miles, from the sun -- closer than any spacecraft has approached. From the electrons' distribution, the physicists were able to discern the size, breadth, and scope of the sun's electric field more clearly than had been done before.

"The key point I would make is you can't make these measurements far away from the sun. You can only make them when you get close," says Jasper Halekas, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa and the study's corresponding author. "It's like trying to understand a waterfall by looking at the river a mile downstream. The measurements we made at 0.1 AU, we're actually in the waterfall. The solar wind is still accelerating at that point. It's really just an awesome environment to be in."

The sun's electric field arises from the interaction of protons and electrons generated when hydrogen atoms are stripped apart in the intense heat generated by fusion deep within the sun. In this environment, electrons, with masses 1,800 times less than that of protons, are blown outward, less constrained by gravity than their weightier proton siblings. But the protons, with their positive charge, exert some control, reining in some electrons due to the familiar attraction forces of oppositely charged particles.

"Electrons are trying to escape, but protons are trying to pull them back. And that is the electric field," says Halekas, a co-investigator for the Solar Wind Electrons, Alphas, and Protons instrument aboard the Parker Solar Probe, the NASA-led mission that launched in August 2018. "If there were no electric field, all the electrons would rush away and be gone. But the electric field keeps it all together as one homogenous flow."

Now, imagine the sun's electric field as an immense bowl and the electrons as marbles rolling up the sides at differing speeds. Some of the electrons, or marbles in this metaphor, are zippy enough to cross over the lip of the bowl, while others don't accelerate enough and eventually roll back toward the bowl's base.

"We are measuring the ones that come back and not the ones that don't come back," Halekas says. "There's basically a boundary in energy there between the ones that escape the bowl and the ones that don't, which can be measured. Since we're close enough to the sun, we can make accurate measurements of electrons' distribution before collisions occur further out that distort the boundary and obscure the imprint of the electric field."

From those measurements the physicists can learn more about the solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour jet of plasma from the sun that washes over the Earth and other planets in the solar system. What they found is the sun's electric field exerts some influence over the solar wind, but less than had been thought.

"We can now put a number on how much of the acceleration is provided by the sun's electric field," Halekas says. "It looks like it's a small part of the total. It's not the main thing that gives the solar wind its kick. That then points to other mechanisms that might be giving the solar wind most of its kick."

The paper, "The sunward electron deficit: A telltale sign of the sun's electric potential," was published online July 14 in The Astrophysical Journal.

         https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210714110441.htm

Making Clean Hydrogen Is Hard

But Researches Just Solved a Major Hurdle

From: University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering

July 15, 2021 -- For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source — splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance.

Now, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found a low-cost way to solve one half of the equation, using sunlight to efficiently split off oxygen molecules from water. The finding, published recently in Nature Communications, represents a step forward toward greater adoption of hydrogen as a key part of our energy infrastructure.

As early as the 1970s, researchers were investigating the possibility of using solar energy to generate hydrogen. But the inability to find materials with the combination of properties needed for a device that can perform the key chemical reactions efficiently has kept it from becoming a mainstream method.

“You need materials that are good at absorbing sunlight and, at the same time, don’t degrade while the water-splitting reactions take place,” said Edward Yu, a professor in the Cockrell School’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “It turns out materials that are good at absorbing sunlight tend to be unstable under the conditions required for the water-splitting reaction, while the materials that are stable tend to be poor absorbers of sunlight. These conflicting requirements drive you toward a seemingly inevitable tradeoff, but by combining multiple materials — one that efficiently absorbs sunlight, such as silicon, and another that provides good stability, such as silicon dioxide — into a single device, this conflict can be resolved.”

However, this creates another challenge — the electrons and holes created by absorption of sunlight in silicon must be able to move easily across the silicon dioxide layer. This usually requires the silicon dioxide layer to be no more than a few nanometers, which reduces its effectiveness in protecting the silicon absorber from degradation.

The key to this breakthrough came through a method of creating electrically conductive paths through a thick silicon dioxide layer that can be performed at low cost and scaled to high manufacturing volumes. To get there, Yu and his team used a technique first deployed in the manufacturing of semiconductor electronic chips. By coating the silicon dioxide layer with a thin film of aluminum and then heating the entire structure, arrays of nanoscale “spikes” of aluminum that completely bridge the silicon dioxide layer are formed. These can then easily be replaced by nickel or other materials that help catalyze the water-splitting reactions.

When illuminated by sunlight, the devices can efficiently oxidize water to form oxygen molecules while also generating hydrogen at a separate electrode and exhibit outstanding stability under extended operation. Because the techniques employed to create these devices are commonly used in manufacturing of semiconductor electronics, they should be easy to scale for mass production.

The team has filed a provisional patent application to commercialize the technology.

Improving the way hydrogen is generated is key to its emergence as a viable fuel source. Most hydrogen production today occurs through heating steam and methane, but that relies heavily on fossil fuels and produces carbon emissions.

There is a push toward "green hydrogen" which uses more environmentally friendly methods to generate hydrogen. And simplifying the water-splitting reaction is a key part of that effort.

Hydrogen has potential to become an important renewable resource with some unique qualities. It already has a major role in significant industrial processes, and it is starting to show up in the automotive industry. Fuel cell batteries look promising in long-haul trucking, and hydrogen technology could be a boon to energy storage, with the ability to store excess wind and solar energy produced when conditions are ripe for them.

Going forward, the team will work to improve the efficiency of the oxygen portion of water-splitting by increasing the reaction rate. The researchers’ next major challenge is then to move on to the other half of the equation.

"We were able to address the oxygen side of the reaction first, which is the more challenging part, " Yu said, "but you need to perform both the hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions to completely split the water molecules, so that's why our next step is to look at applying these ideas to make devices for the hydrogen portion of the reaction."

This research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation through the Directorate for Engineering and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) program. Yu worked on the project with UT Austin students Soonil Lee and Alex De Palma, along with Li Ji, a professor at Fudan University in China.

Making Clean Hydrogen Is Hard, But Researchers Just Solved a Major Hurdle (utexas.edu)

Better Video in Rain or At Night

Novel techniques extract more accurate data from images degraded by environmental factors

From: Yale and National University of Singapore

July 19, 2021 -- A team of researchers has developed novel approaches using computer vision and deep learning to resolve the problem of low-level vision in videos caused by rain and night-time conditions, as well as improve the accuracy of 3D human pose estimation in videos.

Computer vision technology is increasingly used in areas such as automatic surveillance systems, self-driving cars, facial recognition, healthcare and social distancing tools. Users require accurate and reliable visual information to fully harness the benefits of video analytics applications but the quality of the video data is often affected by environmental factors such as rain, night-time conditions or crowds (where there are multiple images of people overlapping with each other in a scene). Using computer vision and deep learning, a team of researchers led by Yale-NUS College Associate Professor of Science (Computer Science) Robby Tan, who is also from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Faculty of Engineering, has developed novel approaches that resolve the problem of low-level vision in videos caused by rain and night-time conditions, as well as improve the accuracy of 3D human pose estimation in videos.

The research was presented at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Combating visibility issues during rain and night-time conditions

Night-time images are affected by low light and human-made light effects such as glare, glow, and floodlights, while rain images are affected by rain streaks or rain accumulation (or rain veiling effect).

"Many computer vision systems like automatic surveillance and self-driving cars, rely on clear visibility of the input videos to work well. For instance, self-driving cars cannot work robustly in heavy rain and CCTV automatic surveillance systems often fail at night, particularly if the scenes are dark or there is significant glare or floodlights," explained Assoc Prof Tan.

In two separate studies, Assoc Prof Tan and his team introduced deep learning algorithms to enhance the quality of night-time videos and rain videos, respectively. In the first study, they boosted the brightness yet simultaneously suppressed noise and light effects (glare, glow and floodlights) to yield clear night-time images. This technique is new and addresses the challenge of clarity in night-time images and videos when the presence of glare cannot be ignored. In comparison, the existing state-of-the-art methods fail to handle glare.

In tropical countries like Singapore where heavy rain is common, the rain veiling effect can significantly degrade the visibility of videos. In the second study, the researchers introduced a method that employs a frame alignment, which allows them to obtain better visual information without being affected by rain streaks that appear randomly in different frames and affect the quality of the images. Subsequently, they used a moving camera to employ depth estimation in order to remove the rain veiling effect caused by accumulated rain droplets. Unlike existing methods, which focus on removing rain streaks, the new methods can remove both rain streaks and the rain veiling effect at the same time.

3D Human Pose Estimation: Tackling inaccuracy caused by overlapping, multiple humans in videos

At the CVPR conference, Assoc Prof Tan also presented his team's research on 3D human pose estimation, which can be used in areas such as video surveillance, video gaming, and sports broadcasting.

In recent years, 3D multi-person pose estimation from a monocular video (video taken from a single camera) is increasingly becoming an area of focus for researchers and developers. Instead of using multiple cameras to take videos from different locations, monocular videos offer more flexibility as these can be taken using a single, ordinary camera -- even a mobile phone camera.

However, accuracy in human detection is affected by high activity, i.e. multiple individuals within the same scene, especially when individuals are interacting closely or when they appear to be overlapping with each other in the monocular video.

In this third study, the researchers estimate 3D human poses from a video by combining two existing methods, namely, a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach. By combining the two approaches, the new method can produce more reliable pose estimation in multi-person settings and handle distance between individuals (or scale variations) more robustly.

The researchers involved in the three studies include members of Assoc Prof Tan's team at the NUS Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he holds a joint appointment, and his collaborators from City University of Hong Kong, ETH Zurich and Tencent Game AI Research Center. His laboratory focuses on research in computer vision and deep learning, particularly in the domains of low level vision, human pose and motion analysis, and applications of deep learning in healthcare.

"As a next step in our 3D human pose estimation research, which is supported by the National Research Foundation, we will be looking at how to protect the privacy information of the videos. For the visibility enhancement methods, we strive to contribute to advancements in the field of computer vision, as they are critical to many applications that can affect our daily lives, such as enabling self-driving cars to work better in adverse weather conditions," said Assoc Prof Tan.

               https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210719110548.htm

"Temporary Gentlemen" of the British Army

Temporary gentlemen (sometimes abbreviated to TG) is a colloquial term referring to officers of the British Army who held temporary (or war-duration) commissions, particularly when such men came from outside the traditional "officer class".

Historically the officers of the British Army were drawn from the gentry and upper middle classes and the expensive uniforms and social expectations placed on officers prevented those without a private income from joining.  The outbreak of the First World War required a rapid expansion in the size of the army and a corresponding increase in the officer corps. During the war more than 200,000 additional officers were recruited, many on temporary commissions. Many of these were drawn from the lower middle and working classes.  They came to be referred to as "temporary gentlemen" with the expectation being that they would revert to their former social standing after the war. At the end of the war, many were unwilling to return to their former positions on reduced salaries and there were too few managerial positions to provide full employment, resulting in considerable hardship. Some former temporary gentlemen became leading literary figures and temporary gentlemen featured in many inter-war stories, plays and films.

The term was revived in the Second World War, which saw a similar increase in the number of officers holding temporary commissions. A staggered demobilization at the war's end helped alleviate some of the issues faced by their forebears. The term continued to see use for officers commissioned from those conscripted for National Service, which lasted until 1963. It has also been used as a translation for miliciano, a term used to describe conscript officers in the Portuguese Army of the 1960s and 1970s.

Background

Until the Cardwell Reforms of 1871 officers' commissions in the British Army were achieved by purchase, except for those in the artillery or engineers. A substantial sum of money was required to enter the profession and to progress via promotion, when the new commission had to be purchased.  The official price ranged in the line infantry from £450 for an ensign to £4,500 for a lieutenant colonel.  Cavalry commissions were more costly, and those in the foot guards the most expensive at £1,200 for an ensign and £9,000 for a lieutenant-colonel.  The purchase was handled by an auction house in London and buyers were often required to pay a supplementary over-regulation or "regimental" price, which varied depending on how popular the regiment was. Sometimes this was many times greater than the official rate; James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, was reported to have paid £40,000 in 1836 for the lieutenant colonelcy of the 11th Hussars.  The profession was therefore only open to the wealthy; it was popularly chosen for the younger sons of the gentry and aristocracy, who would not inherit the family estates and who could sell their commissions upon retirement (provided they did not die, were not promoted to general rank or cashiered for poor behaviour).  The purchase system also meant that the government did not need to provide a proper salary or pension to officers, saving costs.^[1]

Landed families developed traditions of service, successive generations serving in the same regiment.  Such men were considered gentlemen, a term encompassing the upper portion of the British class system, inheriting this status from their fathers and holding it for life no matter their behaviour.  Due to this close connection, holders of officers' commissions generally came to be regarded as gentlemen by association, as reflected in the phrase "an officer and a gentleman".  Many of the traditional "officer class" had attended public schools, and sometimes universities, with Officers' Training Corps (OTC) units and so had been in training for the role from the age of thirteen.

Even after the purchase system was abolished the profession of army officer remained largely the preserve of the landed classes. Officers were required to take part in expensive sports, such as polo, and pay high mess bills. This required a significant private income which precluded the lower classes.  Officers also had to purchase their own uniforms and equipment, which cost at least £200 in the infantry and £600–£1,000 in the cavalry, and, depending on regimental practice, pay subscriptions to provide coaches, bands, theatre tickets, wine cellars and packs of hunting hounds.  In 1900 it was estimated that a junior officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, renowned as the most expensive in the army, required a private income of £500 per year as a bare minimum.  The Coldstream Guards considered £400 per year as a requirement of entry for new officers and the rest of the Household Brigade £300.  In unfashionable regiments (those less popular to new officers) such as the artillery and engineers and some infantry regiments it was considered possible to live on a private income of £60–100.  Officers' pay had not increased since 1806 with the most junior officers receiving a salary of £95 16s 3d (£95.81) per year, much below what professionals earned in the private sector.

Efforts were made to reform the profession in the early Edwardian era but were stymied by resistance from serving officers and a reluctance by the government to provide funding for subsidies to those without the means to maintain the lifestyle.  Only a small number of men from outside the officer class were granted commissions, often those acting in professional roles such as veterinarians or paymasters.  In contrast, the other ranks were almost all drawn from the working class and in the ten years from 1903 an average of just 11 officers per year were commissioned from the ranks.

                       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_gentlemen

 

Widespread Civil Disorder in South Africa

 Riots and looting

On 9 July 2021, the same day KwaZulu-Natal's high court upheld his conviction and prison sentence, the unrest began.  Public violence, burglary, and malicious damage to property were reported in parts of KwaZulu-Natal, with at least 28 people being arrested and a highway being blocked.  The riots continued on the evening of Sunday, 11 July 2021, when multiple news sources indicated reports of gunshots and explosions heard at local malls and residential areas.  The violence quickly escalated, and by the morning of Monday, 12 July 2021, multiple companies and malls were forced to close following widespread looting and violence.  As of 16 July, 212 people have died due to the unrest, and 2,554 have been arrested.  Initial estimates by the South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA) puts the losses in excess of R20 billion.

Racial tensions

In the Indian-majority town of Phoenix, KwaZulu-Natal, some of the residents had armed themselves to fight off looters. This in turn stoked racial tensions between the black and Indian South African citizens, with several racially motivated attacks reported to have taken place.  Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar raised the issue of the safety of Indian-origin people with the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Naledi Pandor, who assured him that the government was trying its best to restore law and order.  Police Minister Bheki Cele stated that the main motive behind the Phoenix riots was criminal and that racial issues were secondary. He confirmed that 20 people had died in the town in the unrest. He also warned people against falling for fake news designed to increase racial tensions.

Incitement

Jacob Zuma's daughter, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, is allegedly among those who have encouraged the looting and violence in order to secure the release of her father as an unverified Twitter account under her name encouraged people to protest.  According to State Security Minister, Ayanda Dlodlo, they are investigating information as to whether senior former agents in the intelligence agency and senior ANC members aligned to former president Jacob Zuma are responsible for igniting the recent violence in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.  Police Minister Bheki Cele added that the security cluster is looking at ten to twelve people who were fueling the riots through social media.  Thulani Dlomo, the former head of the State Security Agency special operations unit and a loyal supporter of Zuma, is also reported to be under investigation for inciting unrest.

State response

Initially, the South African Police Service (SAPS) was deployed in the Nkandla district to control the number of protests in the area.

Over the weekend, as the South African Police Service (SAPS) battled to contain the large-scale looting and damage to infrastructure, pressure mounted on government to deploy the army.

On the morning of Monday, 12 July 2021, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) was deployed in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, as part of Operation Prosper.

On 12 July 2021, president Cyril Ramaphosa addressed the riots, saying that the acts of public violence have been "rarely seen" in democratic South Africa. Ramaphosa referred to the riots as opportunistic acts of violence, citing the lack of grievance, nor any political cause, that can justify the destruction by the protestors. He highlighted the Constitution of South Africa, which guarantees the rights of everyone to express themselves, but stated that the victims of the violence unfolding are the workers, truck drivers, business owners, the parents of those who have lost their lives have all done nothing wrong. He went on to discuss the impact of the riots on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, stating that it has been drastically disrupted after prior setbacks. He also noted how the economy of the country would face further challenges due to food and medication insecurity resulting from the riots. The deployment of SANDF to assist with ending the unrest was also discussed by him.

On the same day, the South African Constitutional Court reserved its previous judgement and rejected Zuma's bid to rescind his prison sentence.  As a result of the decision, Zuma is required to remain imprisoned.

On 14 July 2021, the Minister of Defence and Military Veterans Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula said that the SANDF had increased the deployed number of troops to 25,000.

           https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_South_African_unrest

Update:  2021 South African unrest - Wikipedia

Rats Prefer to Help their Own Kind

A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new research pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. It also suggests humans may share the same neural bias.

From:  University of California – Berkeley

July 13, 2021 -- The findings, published today, Tuesday, July 13, in the journal eLife, suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.

"We have found that the group identity of the distressed rat dramatically influences the neural response and decision to help, revealing the biological mechanism of ingroup bias," said study senior author Daniela Kaufer, a professor of neuroscience and integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

With nativism and conflicts between religious, ethnic and racial groups on the rise globally, the results suggest that social integration, rather than segregation, may boost cooperation among humans.

"Priming a common group membership may be a more powerful driver for inducing pro-social motivation than increasing empathy," said study lead author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, an assistant professor of psychobiology at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.

Bartal launched the study in 2014 as a postdoctoral Miller fellow in Kaufer's laboratory at UC Berkeley. Bartal, Kaufer and UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner led a research team that sought to identify the brain networks activated in rats in response to empathy, and whether they are mirrored in humans. The results suggest they are.

"The finding of a similar neural network involved in empathic helping in rats, as in humans, provides new evidence that caring for others is based on a shared neurobiological mechanism across mammals," Bartal said.

Using fiber photometry, immunohistochemistry, calcium imaging and other diagnostic tools, researchers found that all the rats they studied experienced empathy in response to another rat's signs of distress.

However, to act on that empathy, the helper rat's neural reward circuitry had to be triggered, and that only occurred if the trapped rat was of the same type as the helper rat, or member of its ingroup.

"Surprisingly, we found that the network associated with empathy is activated when you see a distressed peer, whether they are in the ingroup or not," Kaufer said. "In contrast, the network associated with reward signaling was active only for ingroup members and correlated with helping behavior."

Specifically, the rats' empathy correlated with the brain's sensory and orbitofrontal regions, as well as with the anterior insula. Meanwhile, the rodents' decision to help was linked to activity in the nucleus accumbens, a reward center with neurotransmitters that include dopamine and serotonin.

For the study, more than 60 pairs of caged rats were monitored over the course of two weeks. Some of the pairs were of the same strain or genetic tribe while others were not.

In each trial, one rat would be trapped inside a transparent cylinder while the other roamed free in a larger enclosure surrounding the cylinder.

While unconstrained rats consistently signaled empathy in response to the plight of trapped rats, they only worked to free those that were part of their ingroup, in which case they would lean or butt their heads against the cage door to release the rat.

Indeed, in reviewing the results of multiple measures to understand the neural roots of that bias, the research team found that while all the rodents in the trials sensed their cage partner's distress, their brains' reward circuitry was only activated when they came to the rescue of a member of their ingroup.

Moreover, humans and other mammals share virtually the same empathy and reward regions in the brain, implying that we may have similar biases toward our ingroup when it comes to helping others, Bartal noted.

"Overall, the findings suggest that empathy alone doesn't predict helping behavior, and that's really a crucial point," she said. "So, if you want to motivate people to help others who are suffering, it may be that you have to increase their feeling of belonging and group membership, and work toward a common identity."

"Encouragingly," she added, "we find that this mechanism is very flexible and determined primarily by social experience. We will now try to understand how pro-social motivation shifts when rats become friends, and how that is reflected in their brain activity."

             https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713165303.htm

An “Excitonic Insulator” Phase of Matter

New evidence of an anomalous phase of matter brings energy-efficient technologies closer

From: The University of Cambridge Department of Physics Cavendish Laboratory

July 14, 2021 -- Researchers have found evidence for an anomalous phase of matter that was predicted to exist in the 1960s. Harnessing its properties could pave the way to new technologies able to share information without energy losses. These results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

While investigating a quantum material, the researchers from the University of Cambridge who led the study observed the presence of unexpectedly fast waves of energy rippling through the material when they exposed it to short and intense laser pulses. They were able to make these observations by using a microscopic speed camera that can track small and very fast movement on a scale that is challenging with many other techniques. This technique probes the material with two light pulses: the first one disturbs it and creates waves – or oscillations - propagating outward in concentric circles, in the same way as dropping a rock into a pond; the second light pulse takes a snapshot of these waves at various times. Put together, these images allowed them to look at how these waves behave, and to understand their ‘speed limit.’

“At room temperature, these waves move at a hundredth of the speed of light, much faster than we would expect in a normal material. But when we go to higher temperatures, it is as if the pond has frozen,” explained first author Hope Bretscher, who carried out this research at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “We don’t see these waves moving away from the rock at all. We spent a long time searching for why such bizarre behaviour could occur.”

The only explanation that seemed to fit all the experimental observations was that the material hosts, at room temperature, an “excitonic insulator” phase of matter, which while theoretically predicted, had eluded detection for decades.

“In an excitonic insulator, the observed waves of energy are supported by charge neutral particles that can move at electron-like velocities. Importantly, these particles could transport information without being hindered by the dissipation mechanisms that, in most common materials, affect charged particles like electrons,” said Dr Akshay Rao from the Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “This property could provide a simpler route toward room-temperature, energy-saving computation than that of superconductivity.”

The Cambridge team then worked with theorists around the world to develop a model about how this excitonic insulating phase exists, and why these waves behave in this way.

“Theorists predicted the existence of this anomalous phase decades ago, but the experimental challenges to see evidence of this has meant that only now we are able to apply previously developed frameworks to provide a better picture of how it behaves in a real material,” commented Yuta Murakami, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who collaborated on the study.

“The dissipationless energy transfer challenges our current understanding of transport in quantum materials and opens theorists' imaginations to new ways for their future manipulation,” said collaborator Denis Golež, from the Jozef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana.

“This work puts us a step closer toward achieving some incredibly energy-efficient applications that can harness this property, including in computers.” concluded Dr Rao.

https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/news/new-evidence-anomalous-phase-matter-brings-energy-efficient-technologies-closer