Lisa Zyga

Physicists have demonstrated that energy quantization can improve the efficiency of a single-atom heat engine to exceed the performance of its classical counterpart. Energy quantization, in which the energy levels of a system ...

Demonstrating just how challenging it is to keep private data secure, researchers from Imperial College London have presented an attack on a new data privacy system called Diffix, whose breakthrough technology has recently ...

In old cathode ray TVs, a picture is generated when an electron beam excites a phosphor screen, causing the phosphor to radiate light. Now in a new study, researchers have found that a beam of positrons (positively charged ...

Currently, most of the magnetic sensors used in today's computers, airplanes, cars, and other systems distort the magnetic fields that they are measuring. These distortions can cause major problems for some applications, ...

Although microfluidics devices have a wide variety of uses, from point-of-care diagnostics to environmental analysis, one major limitation is that they cannot be modified for different uses on the fly, since their flow paths ...

Cotton thread is made of many tiny fibers, each just 2-3 cm long, yet when spun together the fibers are capable of transmitting tension over indefinitely long distances. From a physics perspective, how threads and yarns transmit ...

Currently, one of the major goals in ultracold science is to cool antihydrogen atoms to as close to absolute zero as possible. Ultracold antihydrogen would pave the way toward ultraprecise antimatter experiments that could ...

Factoring very large numbers into their prime "building blocks" is extremely difficult for classical computers, and this difficulty underlies the security of many cryptographic algorithms. While it's easy to factor the number ...

Physicists have demonstrated that using two quantum channels in different orders can enhance a communication network's ability to transmit information—even, counterintuitively, when the channels are identical. This result ...

Researchers have found that an iron-containing mineral called dusty olivine, present in meteorites, retains a record of the magnetic field from the early solar system around 4.6 billion years ago. The results are surprising, ...

Researchers have designed a "fire alarm wallpaper" made of environmentally friendly, nonflammable materials—including some of the materials found in bone, teeth, and hormones—that can detect a fire, prevent the fire from ...

While batteries have been improving in recent times, at their core today's batteries still operate on the same basic electrochemical principles developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some physicists are now wondering whether ...

Researchers have designed an optical lens with the highest free-space numerical aperture to date, achieving a value of just under 1. As the numerical aperture indicates the highest possible resolution that a lens can attain, ...

Researchers have designed carbon aerogels that can be reversibly stretched to more than three times their original length, displaying elasticity similar to that of a rubber band. By adding reversible stretchability to aerogels' ...

Quantum mechanics has fundamental speed limits—upper bounds on the rate at which quantum systems can evolve. However, two groups working independently have published papers showing for the first time that quantum speed limits ...