latest

Surprising Control over Photoelectrons from a Topological Insulator

The interior bulk of a topological insulator is indeed an insulator, but electrons (spheres) move swiftly on the surface as if through a metal. They are spin-polarized, however, with their momenta (directional ribbons) and spins (arrows) locked together. Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered that the spin polarization of photoelectrons (arrowed sphere at upper right) emitted when the material is struck with high-energy photons (blue-green waves from left) is completely determined by the polarization of this incident light.

Berkeley Lab scientists discover how a photon beam can flip the spin polarization of electrons emitted from an exciting new material Plain-looking but inherently strange crystalline materials called 3D topological insulators (TIs) are all the rage in materials science. Even at room temperature, a single chunk of TI is a good insulator in the bulk, yet behaves like a metal on its surface. Researchers find TIs exciting partly because the electrons that flow swiftly across their surfaces are "spin polarized": the electron's spin is locked to its momentum, perpendicular to the direction of travel. These interesting electronic states promise many uses - some exotic, like observing never-before-seen fundamental particles, but many practical, including building more versatile and efficient high-tech gadgets,…

Nevada climate, environmental data network to inform research, community

University of Nevada, Reno researchers, visiting scholars and the Long Now Foundation tour the Snake Range Subalpine climate/environmental monitoring site in the Bristlecone Pine forest at 11,000-foot elevation in eastern Nevada. The site is one of 13 across the Great Basin of Nevada used to obtain long-term data for research, education and infrastructure planning.

Climate data from 13 geospatial monitoring stations across the Great Basin are being made available to researchers, educators and the public by a group of researchers from the Nevada System of Higher Education. They have developed the long-term climate monitoring network specifically designed to measure variations in climate change and are now working to broaden the network's reach to include the all types of hazard monitoring in the region. "This would be a Nevada-based environmental hazards data and information network," said Scott Mensing, a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno and one of the project's principal investigators. "Anyone in the state could have access to it. It would be for all the people in Nevada." What Mensing…

Ultra-high-speed optical communications link sets new power efficiency record

This shows optical link test chips, including transmitter circuits, laser diodes, photo diode, and receiver circuits.

Ultrafast supercomputers that operate at speeds 100 times faster than current systems are now one step closer to reality. A team of IBM researchers working on a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded program have found a way to transmit massive amounts of data with unprecedentedly low power consumption. The team will describe their prototype optical link, which shatters the previous power efficiency record by half at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) in Anaheim, Calif. March 17-21. Scientists predict that the supercomputers of the future—so-called "exascale computers"—will enable them to model the global climate, run molecular-level simulations of entire cells, design nanostructures, and more. "We envision machines reaching the exascale mark around…

OpenFabrics Alliance Announces Current Agenda and Keynote Speaker for International Developer Workshop

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) today announced the release of the current agenda and keynote speaker for its annual International Developer Workshop, April 21-24 at the Monterey Marriott in Monterey, CA. What: The multi-day workshop has presentations and panel sessions by industry leaders on different aspects of the use, development and improvement of OpenFabrics Software (OFS) covering topics such as scalable architectures, enterprise data centers, storage, cloud, and Big Data. Mark Seager, Chief Technology Officer for the High Performance Computing Ecosystem at Intel, will provide the keynote session on Sunday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m. Why: The workshop is open to developers, technologists, supporters, end-users and business professionals who want to provide collaborative input into the future direction and mechanics of…

Obsidian Strategics Ramps Up as the InfiniBand World Preps for an Intel vs Mellanox Showdown

Metro, Regional and Global Reach are Table Stakes for InfiniBand’s Entry into Big Data markets in both Bio-Science and the Enterprise Marketplace As a pioneer of “InfiniBand over the WAN”, Obsidian expects explosive growth in the coming years to satisfy industry demand for secure, high-throughput and ultra low-latency direct memory interconnects. Having driven pivotal rack level server and storage innovations such as multi-core processors and flash memory arrays during the last decade, the practitioners of supercomputing, Internet-scale cloud and Enterprise data centers are now turning their attention to scale-out networking. High performance and scalable standards-based InfiniBand interconnects have come to dominate mainstream high-performance supercomputing, and are aligning for dominance in mega-scale data center applications for the same reasons. Obsidian is…