News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Grainger College of Engineering have experimentally demonstrated a new way to transport energy even through wave-guides that are defective, and even if the disorder is a transient phenomenon in time.

Xu Yi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, collaborated with Yun-Feng Xiao's group from Peking University and researchers at Caltech to achieve the broadest recorded spectral span in a microcomb. Their peer-reviewed paper, "Chaos-assisted two-octave-spanning microcombs," was published May 11, 2020, in Nature Communications.

Engineers have demonstrated a method for ensuring that an increasingly popular method of genetic identification called "DNA fingerprinting" remains secure against inadvertent mistakes or malicious attacks in the field. The technique relies on introducing genetic "barcodes" to DNA samples as they are collected and securely sending information crucial to identifying these barcodes to technicians in the laboratory.

Columbia engineers are the first to build a high-performance non-reciprocal device on a compact chip with a performance 25 times better than previous work. The new chip, which can handle several watts of power (enough for cellphone transmitters that put out a watt or so of power), was the leading performer in a DARPA SPAR program to miniaturize these devices and improve performance metrics.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used state-of-the-art atomic clocks, advanced light detectors, and a measurement tool called a frequency comb to boost the stability of microwave signals 100-fold. This marks a giant step toward better electronics to enable more accurate time dissemination, improved navigation, more reliable communications and higher-resolution imaging for radar and astronomy.

In a recent breakthrough, a team of HKUST scientists developed an adaptive optics two-photon excitation fluorescence microscopy using direct wavefront sensing for high-resolution in vivo fluorescence imaging of mouse retina, which allow in vivo fundus imaging at an unprecedented resolution after full AO correction.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have boosted their control of the fundamental properties of molecules at the quantum level by linking or 'entangling' an electrically charged atom and an electrically charged molecule, showcasing a way to build hybrid quantum information systems that could manipulate, store and transmit different forms of data.