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Australia’s Department of Agriculture announced  remote diagnostics  that it is in the final stages of developing a new breed of pineapple that is sweet and juicy, but has the added taste of coconut, making it suitable for the for piña colada cocktails.

The AusFestival pineapple will allow mixologists to create better piña colada drinks for everyone. While it won’t revolutionize mixology, it will definitely add something different. The agency’s research station in Queensland has been working on this breed of pineapple for more than a decade.

The pineapple has a coconut-flavor, which is unique. The piña colada was developed almost six decades ago in P industrial LTE router  uerto Rico by Ramón ‘Monchito’ Marrero. It took him three months to come up with this drink.

Currently, piña coladas are made by shaking rum, cream of coconut, and pineapple juice  mri remote monitoring  together with ice before straining the mixture and serving it.

Initially, the researchers didn’t intend on creating a pineapple that tasted like coconut. They were simply trying to get a nicely-flavored pineapple, low in acid and aromatic. It will take at least two years before the first commercial AusFestival pineapples are planted.

[via Daily Mail]

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“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Image from iStock .

Say goodbye to fast-food burgers and hello to fresh garden salads. While observing 37,698 men for up to 22 years and 83,644 women for up to 28 years, a new  digital signage  study found that regular consumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk.

A new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers has found that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. The results also showed that substituting other healthy protein sources, such as fish, poultry, nuts, and legumes, was associated with a lower risk of mortality.

“Our study adds more evidence to the health risks of eating high amounts of red meat, which has been associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers in other studies,” said lead author An Pan, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH.

The study was published online in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers, including senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, and colleagues, prospectively observed 37,698 men from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study for up to 22 years and 83,644 women in the Nurses’ Health Study for up to 28 years who were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. Their diets were assessed through questionnaires every four years.

A combined 23,926 deaths were documented in the two studies, of which 5,910 were from cardiovascular disease and 9,464 from cancer. Regular c cellular router  onsumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk. One daily serving of unp plc-programming  rocessed red meat (about the size of a deck of cards) was associated with a 13 percent increased risk of mortality, and one daily serving of processed red meat (one hot dog or two slices of bacon) was associated with a 20 percent increased risk.

Among specific causes, the corresponding increases in risk were 18 percent and 21 percent for cardiovascular mortality, and 10 percent and 16 percent for cancer mortality. These analyses took into account chronic disease risk factors such as age, body mass index, physical activity, and family history of heart disease or major cancers.

Red meat, especially processed meat, contains ingredients that have been linked to increased risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. These include heme iron, saturated fat, sodium, nitrites, and certain carcinogens that are formed during cooking.

Replacing one serving of total red meat with one serving of a healthy protein source was associated with a lower mortality risk: 7 percent for fish, 14 percent for poultry, 19 percent for nuts, 10 percent for legumes, 10 percent for low-fat dairy products, and 14 percent for whole grains. The researchers estimated that 9.3 percent of deaths in men and 7.6 percent in women could have been prevented at the end of the follow-up if all the participants had consumed less than 0.5 servings per day of red meat.

“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said Hu. “On the other hand, choosing more healthful sources of protein in place of red meat can confer significant health benefits by reducing chronic disease morbidity and mortality.”

Support for the study was provided by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Cancer Institute.

Other HSPH authors include Qi Sun, Adam Bernstein, JoAnn Manson, Meir Stampfer, and Walter Willett.

Image: iStock, Harvard Gazette

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As part of the SCENICC program, DARPA researchers are working on futuristic contact lenses that will offer a dual purpose. These lenses will allow users to focus on objects that are close up and far away simultaneously, while enh remote diagnostics  ancing normal vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images.

Currently being developed by DARPA researchers at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks are contact lenses that enhance norm cloud vms  al vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus. Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye. These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away. This could impro industrial IoT router  ve ability to use tiny portable displays while sill interacting with the surrounding environment.

Developed as part of DARPA’s Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program, SCENICC’s objective is to eliminate the ISR capability gap that exists at the individual Soldier level. The program seeks to develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software that give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability.

Image: DARPA

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Keeping a close eye on everything: Christian Ast checks the connections of the scanning tunneling microscope (top). Researchers in the Nanoscale Science Department conduct their experiments in this instrument at lowest temperatures of a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. The principle is always the same (bottom): A tunneling current (illustrated by the transparent bar) flows between an ultrafine tip and the sample, providing information about the properties of the sample. At these low temperatures the tunneling current reveals all of its quantum properties.

A newly published study from the Max Planck Institute reveals what would happen if an electric current no longer flowed, but trickled instead.

What would happen if an electric current no longer flowed, but trickled instead? This was the question investigated by researchers working with Christian Ast at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Their investigation involved cooling their scanning tunneling microscope down to a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. At these extremely low temperatures, the electrons reveal their quantum nature. The electric current is therefore a granular medium, consisting of individual particles. The electrons trickle through a conductor like grains of sand in an hourglass, a phenomenon that can be explained with the aid of quantum electrodynamics.

Flowing water from a tap feels like a homogeneous medium – it is impossible to distinguish between the individual water molecules. Exactly the same thing is true about electric current. So many electrons flow in a conventional cable that the current appears to be homogeneous. Although it is not possible to distinguish individual electrons, quantum mechanics says they should exist. So how do they behave? Under which conditions does the current not flow li vending computer ke water through a tap, but rather trickles like sand in an hourglass?

The hourglass analogy is very appropriate for the scanning tunneling microscope, where a thin, pointed tip scans across the surface of a sample without actually touching it. A tiny current flows nevertheless, as there is a slight probability that electrons “tunnel” from the pointed tip into the sample. This tunneling current is an exponential function of the separation, which is why the pointed tip is located only a few Ångström (a ten millionth of a millimeter) above the sample.

Minute variations in the tunneling current thus allow researchers to resolve individual atoms and atomic structures on surfaces and investigate their electronic structure. Scanning tunneling microscopes are therefore some of the most versatile and sensitive detectors in the whole of solid state physics.

Even under these extreme conditions – a tiny current of less than one billionth of the current that flows through a Global Leader in Industrial IoT   100-watt light bulb – billions of electrons per second still flow. This is too many to discern individual electrons. The temperature was down at around a fifteen thousandth of a degree above absolute zero (i.e. at minus 273.135°C or 15 mK) before the scientists saw that the electric current consists of individual electrons.

At this low temperature, very fine structures, which the researchers had not expected, appear in the spectrum. “We could explain these new structures only by assuming that the tunneling current is a granular medium and no longer homogeneous,” says Ast, who heads the group working with the scanning tunneling microscope. This is thus the first time that the full quantum nature of electronic transport in the scanning tunneling microscope has shown itself.

The electric charge must therefore be quantized as well if this quantum mechanical phenomenon is to be fully explained. “The theory on which this is based was developed back at the beginning of the 1990s. Now that conceptual and practical issues relating to its application to scanning tunneling microscopes have been solved, it is nice to see how consistently theory and experiment fit together,” says Joachim Ankerhold from the University of Ulm, who contributed the theoretical basis.

In addition to a detailed theory, experiments of this type require an adapted laboratory environment which reduces external disturbances to a large extent. Since the end of 2012, a new precision laboratory has been in operation on the campus of the Max Planck Institutes in Stuttgart; it provides an almost disturbance-free laboratory environment for highly sensitive experiments such as the mK scanning tunneling microscope.

The instrument is located in the precision laboratory in a box equipped with both acoustic and electromagnetic shielding on a vibration-decoupled concrete base. “We want to use it to venture into new, unknown territory – which we did very successfully with this experiment,” says Klaus Kern, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research.

Electrons have already demonstrated their quantum nature. As they are transported through quantum dots, for example, the current flow is specifically blocked so that the electrons appear individually. This effect became evident in the scanning tunneling microsco Grid Analytics System pe simply by cooling it to extremely low temperatures, however. “The tunnel effect has definitely reached the quantum limit here,” says team member Berthold Jäck. The researchers do not want to view this as a limitation, however. “These extremely low temperatures open up an unexpected richness of detail which allows us to understand superconductivity and light-matter interactions much better,” says Christian Ast.

Publication: Christian R. Ast, et al., “Sensing the quantum limit in scanning tunnelling spectroscopy,” Nature Communications 7, Article number: 13009 (2016) doi:10.1038/ncomms13009

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An artist’s conception shows how any number of incoming photons (top) can be absorbed by a cloud of ultra-cold atoms (center), tuned so that only one single photon can pass through at a time. Being able to produce a controlled beam of single photons has been a goal of research toward creating quantum devices. Graphic: Christine Daniloff

Using a technique based on electromagnetically induced transparency, MIT and Harvard scientists have achieved the ability to convert a laser beam into a stream of single photons, or particles of light, in a controlled way, possibly opening the door for new quantum devices such as quantum gates.

In theory, quantum computers should be able to perform certain kinds of complex calculations much faster than conventional computers, and quantum-based communication could be invulnerable to eavesdroppin 3g sunsetg. But producing quantum components for real-world devices has proved to be fraught with daunting challenges.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard University h industrial LTE router as achieved a crucial long-term goal of such efforts: the ability to convert a laser beam into a stream of single photons, or particles of light, in a controlled way. The successful demonstration of this achievement is detailed in a paper published this week in the journal Nature by MIT doctoral student Thibault Peyronel and colleagues.

Senior author Vladan Vuletić, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, says the achievement “could enable new quantum devices” such as quantum gates, where a single photon switches the direction of travel or polarization of another photon. This goal has been very hard to attain, Vuletić explains, because photons ordinarily interact, at best, only very weakly with one another.

Encouraging such interactions requires atoms that interact strongly with photons — as well as with other atoms that, in turn, can affect other photons. For example, a single photon traveling through a cloud of such atoms might pass through easily, but change the state of the atoms so that a second photon is blocked when it tries to pass through. That means that if two photons try to pass through at once, only one will succeed, while the other is absorbed.

So, in the new system, no matter how many photons are sent into such a cloud of atoms, only one at a time emerges from the other side. The cloud acts as a kind of turnstile for photons, forcing a jumbled mob into an orderly succession of individuals.

Atac Imamoglu, professor of physics at ETH Zurich, who was not involved in this research, says “I view this work as a true breakthrough in quantum optics, as the authors realize a completely novel way of inducing strong interactions between single photons.”

The system is based on a phenomenon called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), used previously as a way of slowing a beam of light. (The well-known invariance of the speed of light, first formulated by Albert Einstein, only applies to light in a vacuum. Light traveling through matter can move at different speeds.) Various research groups, including members of this team of MIT and Harvard researchers, had published results a decade ago showing that light, and even single photons, could be slowed to a walking pace — or even stopped altogether — and then allowed to resume a normal speed.

This slowing of l industrial m2m  ight is achieved by passing a focused laser beam through a dense cloud of ultracold atoms (in this case, rubidium atoms) chilled to about 40 microkelvins, or 40 millionths of a degree above absolute zero. This cloud is normally opaque to light, but a separate laser beam produces the EIT state that lets photons pass through at a slow speed while elevating atoms to an excited state. Atoms in this state (called a Rydberg state) interact very strongly with each other, meaning that a second photon does not meet the EIT condition if the first photon is still in the medium. So whenever a single photon enters, it passes through the temporarily transparent medium; when two or more enter, the gas becomes opaque again, blocking all but the first photon.

“If you send in one photon, it just passes through, but if you send in two or three, forcing them to squeeze through the tight focus of the laser beam, just one passes,” says Ofer Firstenberg, a Harvard postdoc who is one of the paper’s co-authors. “It’s like a lot of sand going into an hourglass, but only one grain at a time can pass through,” he says.

As a result, a conventional laser beam — a bundle of photons — fired into one end of this new apparatus comes out the other end as a sequential string of individual photons.

Stephen Harris, professor of electrical engineering and professor of applied physics emeritus at Stanford University, who was not connected with the project, says the team’s experiment “worked significantly better than I might have guessed that it would. This is likely due to the, in my mind, unexpectedly robust interactions of nearby Rydberg atoms.” As a result of this work, he says, “For the first time, non-resonant single photon physics is a reality.”

The technique can be used to alter the state of the atoms according to the number of photons striking them, with a second laser beam detecting those changed states. “One big goal has been to measure a photon without affecting it,” Vuletić says. “We know how to detect individual optical photons, but only by destroying them. This technique should allow you to measure your photon and keep it, too.”

Eugene S. Polzik, professor of physics at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University and director of the Danish Center for Quantum Optics, says, “Demonstration of the efficient nonlinear interaction at a single photon level is one of the most important goals in quantum information processing. This work is an exciting new development in this direction. It paves the way towards new implementations of photon quantum logic.”

The system could lead to the development of a single-photon switch, the team says. It could also be used to develop quantum logic gates, an essential component of an all-optical quantum information-processing system. Such systems, in principle, could be immune from eavesdropping when used for communication, and could also allow much more efficient processing of certain kinds of computation tasks.

Besides potential commercial applications, the system offers new insights into the basic interactions between light and matter, Vuletić says.

Stanford’s Harris calls this a “wonderful and major scientific advance.”

The work was conducted in collaboration with Mikhail Lukin’s group at Harvard and was partly supported by the National Science Foundation, the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Quantum Memories Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.

Image: Christine Daniloff

Reprinted with permission of MIT News

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Researchers at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new battery technology that captures waste heat and converts it into electricity.

Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants. Researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy. Most such efforts have focused on thermoelectric devices – solid-state materials that can produce electricity from a temperature gradient – but the efficiency of such devices is limited by the availability of materials.

Now researchers at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a new alternative for low-temperature waste-heat conversion into electricity – that is, in cases where temperature differences are less than 100 degrees Celsius.

The new approach is described in a study, published in the journal Nature Communications, by Seok Woo Lee and Yi Cui at Stanford and Yuan Yang and Gang Chen at MIT.

“Virtually all power plants and manufacturing processes, like steelmaking and ref industrial equipmentining, release tremendous amounts of low-grade heat to ambient temperatures,” said Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering. “Our new battery technology is designed to take advantage of this temperature gradient at the industrial scale.”

Voltage and temperature

The new Stanford-MIT system is based on the principle known as the thermogalvanic effect, which states that the voltage of a rechargeable battery is dependent on temperature. “To harvest thermal energy, we subject a battery to a four-step process: heating up, charging, cooling down and discharging,” said Lee, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-lead author of the study.

First, an uncharged battery is heated by waste heat. Then, while the battery is still warm, a voltage is applied. Once fully charged, the battery is allowed to cool. Because of the thermogalvanic effect, the voltage increases as the temperature decreases. When the battery has cooled, it actually delivers more electricity than was used to charge it. That extra energy doesn’t appear from nowhere, explained Cui. It comes from the heat that was added to the system.

The Stanford-MIT system aims at harvesting heat at temperatures below 100 C, which accounts for a major part of potentially harvestable waste heat. “One-third of all energy consumption in the United States ends up as low-grade heat,” said co-lead author Yang, a postdoc at MIT.

In the experiindustrial 3g m2mment, a battery was heated to 60 C, charged and cooled. The process resulted in an electricity-conversion efficiency of 5.7 percent, almost double the efficiency of conventional thermoelectric devices.

This heating-charging-cooling approach was first proposed in the 1950s at temperatures of 500 C or more, said Yang, noting that most heat recovery systems work best with higher temperatu fault detection  re differences.

“A key advance is using material that was not around at that time” for the battery electrodes, as well as advances in engineering the system, said co-author Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

“This technology has the additional advantage of using low-cost, abundant materials and manufacturing processes that are already widely used in the battery industry,” added Lee.

‘Clever idea’

While the new system has a significant advantage in energy-conversion efficiency over conventional thermoelectric devices, it has a much lower power density – that is, the amount of power that can be delivered for a given weight. The new technology also will require further research to assure long-term reliability and improve the speed of battery charging and discharging, Chen added. “It will require a lot of work to take the next step.”

There is currently no good technology that can make effective use of the relatively low-temperature differences this system can harness, Chen said. “This has an efficiency we think is quite attractive. There is so much of this low-temperature waste heat, if a technology can be created and deployed to use it.”

The results are very promising, said Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. “By exploring the thermogalvanic effect, [the MIT and Stanford researchers] were able to convert low-grade heat to electricity with decent efficiency,” he said. “This is a clever idea, and low-grade waste heat is everywhere.”

Other authors of the study are Hyun-Wook Lee of Stanford and Hadi Ghasemi and Daniel Kraemer of MIT.

The Stanford work was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Research Foundation of Korea. The MIT work was partially funded by the DOE, in part through the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center.

Publication: Seok Woo Lee, et al., “An electrochemical system for efficiently harvesting low-grade heat energy,” Nature Communications 5, Article number: 3942; doi:10.1038/ncomms4942

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT News Office

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This artist’s conception depicts the sudden contraction and elongation experienced by the unit cell of the ferroelectric material lead titanate as an intense pulse of violet light hits it. This atomic-scale wiggle represents the first step in the photovoltaic response that light produces in this an azure iot certified  d related materials. Illustration by Gregory M. Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Researchers at SLAC’s Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science and the Stanford Materials Science and Engineering Department discovered what is going on when ferroelectric materials produce an electric voltage when exposed to light. By using the X-ray Pump Probe instrument of SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source, the researchers analyzed information from thousands of images to determine the photovoltaic mechanism.

A surprising atomic-scale wiggle underlies the way a special class of materials reacts to light, according to research that may lead to new devices for harvesting solar energy.

For decades, scientists have known that some ferroelectric materials – materials that possess a stable electrical polarization switchable by an external electric field – are also photovoltaic: They produce an electric voltage when exposed to light, just as solar cells do. But it was not clear how the light induced voltages in these materials.

Such insight is very useful to researchers hoping to design ferroelectrics with improved photovoltaic properties for use in solar cells and other applications, such as sensors and ultrafast optical switches for data and telecommunications networks. Several possible mechanisms have been proposed, with many open questions still remaining.

Now, in research published last week in Physical Review Letters, scientists led by Aaron Lindenberg of SLAC’s Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science and the Stanford Materials Science and Engineering Department, along with graduate student Dan Daranciang, have determined first-hand what i Industrial 3G Cellular Modem  s going on: Stop-action X-ray snapshots of a ferroelectric nanolayer showed that the height of its basic building block, called a unit cell, contracted in response to bright light and then rebounded to become even longer than it was to begin with.

The entire in-and-out atomic-scale wiggle took just 10 trillionths of a second, yet it indicated the mechanisms responsible for the materials photovoltaic effect. “What we saw was unanticipated,” Lindenberg said. “It was amazing to see such dramatic structural changes, which we showed were caused by light-induced electrical currents in the ferroelectric material.& cloud platform  rdquo;

The telling X-ray images were taken at the X-ray Pump Probe instrument of SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which hit the ferroelectric samples with a stunningly rapid one-two punch of violet laser light (40 quadrillionths of a second long) and X-rays (60 quadrillionths of a second long). The researchers analyzed information from thousands of images to determine the photovoltaic mechanism.

The fact that ferroelectric materials produce much higher voltages than conventional silicon-based materials makes them an attractive option for making solar cells, Lindenberg said. But their very low light-conversion efficiency has precluded commercial applications. Now that researchers understand the underlying mechanism, he said, they can more effectively create ferroelectric materials that are more suitable for photovoltaic applications.

Image: Gregory M. Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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Electron microscope image of a prototype chip using a ring of coupled oscillators to generate terahertz radiation. Silicon cannot oscillate in the terahertz range, but the design focuses most of the energy in a high harmonic. The signal radiates on the axis of the ring and can be aimed. Provided/Ehsan Afshari

A recently published paper describes how scientists at Cornell University developed a new method of generating terahertz signals using the familiar and inexpensive CMOS chip technology, generating power levels high enough for some medical applications.

Cornell researchers have developed a new method of generating terahertz signals on an inexpensive silicon chip, offering possible applications in medical imaging, security scanning and wireless data transfer.

Terahertz radiation, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, penetrates cloth and leather and just a few millimeters into the skin, but without the potentially damaging effects of X-rays. Terahertz scanning can identify skin cance industrial IoT Gateway  rs too small to see with the naked eye. Many of the complex organic chemicals used in explosives absorb terahertz radiation at particular frequencies, creating a “signature” that detectors can read. And because higher frequencies can carry more bandwidth, terahertz signals could make a sort of super-Bluetooth that could transfer an entire high-definition movie wirelessly in a few seconds.

Current methods of generating terahertz radiation involve lasers, vacuum tubes and special circuits cooled near absolute zero, often in room-sized apparatus costing thousands of dollars. Ehsan AfshGrid Fault Detectionari, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has developed a new method using the familiar and inexpensive CMOS chip technology, generating power levels high enough for some medical applications. With further research, higher power will be possible, Afshari said, enabling such devices as handheld scanners for law enforcement.

Afshari and graduate students Y industrial IoT router  ahya Tousi and Vahnood Pourahma describe the new approach in the June 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Schematic of a ring of oscillators (gray circles) coupled to generate terahertz frequencies. Coupling circuits (blue triangles) shift the phase of the oscillations to reinforce the fourth harmonic. Provided/Ehsan Afshari

The ability of solid-state devices to generate high frequencies is limited by the characteristics of the material — basically, how fast electrons can move back and forth in a transistor. So circuit designers make use of harmonics — signals that naturally appear at multiples of the fundamental frequency of an oscillator. That fundamental frequency is usually set by a circuit that uses a variable capacitor called a varactor, but at terahertz frequencies varactors don’t tune sharply. Afshari has come up with a new way of tuning by coupling several oscillators in a ring, producing what engineers call a high-quality signal, where all the power goes into a very narrow frequency band.

Connect two springs and set one vibrating, and the other will begin to vibrate as well, and eventually they will settle to an equilibrium. A ring of electronic oscillators does the same, and the circuits coupling the oscillators can set the frequency at which they will lock in. In Afshari’s device the couplers also shift the phase of the signals, that is, how the peaks and valleys of the waves line up. With the right adjustment, the peaks and valleys cancel each other out at several harmonics but reinforce each other at one — in this case the fourth — channeling most of the power there.

In early experiments, the researchers fabricated chips that generated signals with about 10,000 times the power level previously obtained at terahertz frequencies on a silicon chip. The signal emerges along the axis of the ring, and what the researchers called an intriguing possibility is that by adjusting the couplers separately they could aim the output, making it possible to scan large areas with a narrow, high-powered beam.

The power could be increased by adding more oscillators to the ring or using multiple rings, and Afshari is working with Cornell experts on gallium nitride, a chip material that can handle both higher frequencies and higher power. But Afshari said he wants to focus on less-expensive silicon. “The goal is to make a complete device on one CMOS chip,” he said. “I can envision a tiny thing you could put in a cell phone.”

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Semiconductor Research Corp., a consortium supported by private industry and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Administration.

Images: Provided/Ehsan Afshari; Cornell Chronicle