ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

For decades, field-effect transistors enabled by silicon-based semiconductors have powered the electronics revolution. But in recent years, manufacturers have come up against hard physical limits to further size reductions and efficiency gains of silicon chips. That has scientists and engineers looking for alternatives to conventional metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors.

A research group has explored the potential production of micro-scale organic electronics for use in bioelectronics via multiphoton 3-D printers.

Over the last two decades, microscopy has seen unprecedented advances in speed and resolution. However, cellular structures are essentially three-dimensional, and conventional super-resolution techniques often lack the necessary resolution in all three directions to capture details at a nanometer scale. A research team has now investigated a super-resolution imaging technique that involves combining the advantages of two different methods to achieve the same resolution in all three dimensions; this is 'isotropic' resolution.

Researchers have made a new discovery on how light behaves in complex media, media that tends to distort light significantly. They demonstrated that 'distortion' is a matter of perspective, outlining a simple rule that applies to all light and a vast array of media, including underwater, optical fiber, transmission in the atmosphere and even through living biological samples. Their novel quantum approach to the problem resolves a standing debate on whether some forms of light are robust or not, correcting some misconceptions in the community.

Communication networks need nodes at which information is processed or rerouted. Physicists have now developed a network node for quantum communication networks that can store single photons in a vapor cell and pass them on later.