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“The dream of clean energy is closer”.

“Nuclear fusion takes a big step forward”.

Those are just two recent headlines concerning the latest developments in nuclear fusion. There is little doubt that progress has been made in recent years with new results at international facilities and the ITER nuclear fusion experimental reactor in Cadarache, France, inching closer following years of delays and cost overruns. The past few years have also seen significant private investment with countless start-up companies looking to commercialize fusion in the coming decade.

With these developments, one might think that fusion is about to finally deliver clean energy following decades of promise. Media articles certainly give this angle yet little attention is given to the problems that commercial fusion devices might face when scaling up. Nuclear fusion reactors will not only need to fuse the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium (D-T) to produce power but also be fuel self-sufficient.

Obtaining enough deuterium, which occurs naturally, is not a problem, but tritium only exists in trace amounts with limited stocks available as a by-product from fission reactors. The 14 MeV neutrons produced in the D-T reaction must therefore not only produce useful heat but also interact with lithium “blankets” to produce tritium. This tritium will then be recycled to provide later input into the reactor with any excess stored for a subsequent reactor. In other words, reactors will need to have a tritium breeding ratio (BR) greater than one.

Natural lithium has two naturally-occurring stable isotopes: lithium-6 at 7.6% abundance and lithium-7 at 92.4% abundance. The different interaction of the two lithium isotopes with neutrons to produce tritium is well known with lithium-6 being by far the more important in terms of producing tritium. Although there are suggestions that natural lithium can provide a sufficient breeding ratio, others say that it is essential to isotopically enrich the lithium-6 content.

Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), has suggested that the lithium-6 to lithium-7 ratio would need to be more like 40/60. This raises two questions: how might this be done and how much lithium is required? Chapman states that a commercial enrichment method would need to be set up and the UKAEA is now exploring several possible routes. (Although one method already exists, the COLEX process, it uses large quantities of mercury and has been banned since 1963 in the US).

With regard to the amount of lithium required, this can be roughly calculated for a tokamak using the requirement that a thickness of about 1 m of lithium is needed to slow and stop the fast neutrons. The exact amount of lithium will, of course, depend on the exact blanket structure but it must be sufficient to ensure that as many neutrons as possible interact with it to breed tritium.

For a simple spherical reactor with a chamber diameter of 1 m, a 1 m thick surrounding shell of lithium could weigh about 7.5 metric tonnes – and more if the machine were bigger. To obtain a 40/60 ratio of lithium-6 to lithium-7, a starting quantity of some 40 tonnes of natural lithium would need to be enriched, a significant target for whatever process emerges.

There have been several suggestions that the breeding material could either be pure lithium, lithium-lead or ceramic lithium compounds. Whatever the exact breeding material, the efficient retrieval of the tritium in the light of its fast diffusion in the hot reactor environment will be crucial.

Might ITER use the total available inventory of tritium worldwide in their experiments?

An important reactor issue at start-up will be the quantity of tritium available to fuel the reactor until the breeding system allows the reactor to become self-sufficient. One would need to know how quickly the tritium can be recycled and how much would be needed as a back-up in case problems arise. The amount of tritium being trapped in the fusion reactor also needs to be taken into account. Clearly a reactor is unlikely to be built unless there is certainty that it will not run out of the essential tritium, both at the start and in the breeding cycle.

A key factor in tritium discussions must be its availability, and this is often quoted to be between 20–30 kg extracted from heavy water reactors such as the CANDU reactors in Canada. Of interest here is that ITER stated in March 2023 that it will use the total available inventory of tritium worldwide in their experiments. Even if this claim is exaggerated, it is not clear how the owners of tritium stocks will distribute these to potential customers. A recent agreement on tritium collaboration between the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and the UKAEA could benefit the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production – a demonstration nuclear-fusion power plant – that is planned to switch on in the UK in the 2040s.

Much is also made about how fusion is cleaner than fission. This is true, but both make use of large amounts of reactive lithium and the creation of radiologically unpleasant tritium means that it can’t be compared to greener options such as renewables. Although the radioactivity of tritium decays with a relatively low energy 5.7 keV beta particle, its rapid interchange with hydrogen to give tritiated water (HTO) could contaminate ground water, which can then enter the food chain. This has led to very strict limits for the release of HTO from heavy water reactors and other nuclear installations. One assumes similar limits would equally apply to a fusion reactor.

The fusion community still has many issues to iron out before it can become a viable energy source. Fusion has already been studied for over six decades and the following two will see whether the fusion dream can put energy on the grid economically, or whether it will remain just that – a dream.

The post The fusion industry must rise to its tritium challenge appeared first on Physics World.

Iron carries oxygen throughout the body, but ironically, it can also make it harder to breathe for people with asthma.

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While some of these illnesses have a likely source, there are a few that have researchers stumped.

The closing debate of the ESTRO congress always serves to both educate and entertain, and ESTRO 2024 was no exception. Billed as “Clash of the tartans – the great AI debate” – in a nod to this year’s Glasgow location, the presenters debated the motion: “This house believes that the radiation therapy care pathway will be delivered entirely by bots by 2040”.

“The only way forward”

The first speaker, Andrew Hope from the Princess Margaret Cancer Center in Toronto, explained that population growth is leading to an insurmountable cancer burden, with worldwide cancer cases predicted to roughly double by 2040. He argued that, with hospitals already struggling to meet the demands of cancer patients, automation is the only possible way forward.

Hope described how the immense amount of computational power now at our disposal is being applied to new applications such as artificial intelligence (AI). “Just in the last five years we have gone from relatively simple games like AlphaGo to real functional applications that affect our day-to-day life,” he explained.

Alongside, AI-based robotics – machines that translate computational power into the physical world – have progressed at vast pace. Within industry and manufacturing, robotics is becoming an absolute necessity, Hope explained. “This is happening whether we like it or not, which is why we need to adapt it and incorporate bots and automation into healthcare immediately.”

In many ways, we already have. AI is now being developed for every step stage in the radiotherapy care pathway – from diagnostic imaging to treatment planning and delivery to follow-up. The only thing that’s not yet being done is to look at this as a cohesive whole and run it without significant human intervention.

“It doesn’t mean we’re all out of jobs,” Hope added. “It just means we get to do more of what we love, which is talking to patients and addressing their concerns, adjudicating challenging cases and improving the bots to make this entire pathway more seamless, safe and flexible.”

He shared an example of a next-generation treatment system that can scan, plan and treat in one, using two robot arms, one housing the detector and the other the treatment and diagnostic unit. The system can move around a patient to capture a cone-beam CT, then immediately plan, contour and treat with the patient still in place.

“We can automate, and we should, because we have to,” Hope concluded. “We have to treat people rapidly, and safely. Even if we become a virtual automated hospital, it’s still going to be something that we can control.”

“AI is stupid”

Andre Dekker, a medical physicist at MAASTRO Clinic, does not agree. He began his presentation by explaining how Croatia has the toughest conditions in the world for acquiring a driving license, requiring 85 hours of lessons before even taking a driving test. So why not move to a self-driving car instead? He pointed out that Google started its project on self-driving cars 15 years ago, but today there’s still no truly autonomous vehicle on the market.

And while it takes 85 hours to get a driving license in Croatia, it requires 11 years of education to train as a radiation oncologist, physicist or radiation therapist (RTT). “The assumption that in 15 years we can automate the entire radiation oncology pathway is just ludicrous. It’s never going to happen. We cannot automate 11 years of specialized education.”

Dekker’s second argument was simply that “AI is stupid”. When analysing images, for example, humans can recognise related features via “few shot learning”, which AI simply cannot do. AI trained to identify the liver in a supine CT scan, for example, can’t recognize a liver in a prone scan, whereas a human could. “AI is so stupid if you give it a scan of the head it will draw you a liver,” he said. “AI will make mistakes that harm patients.”

AI is also biased, Dekker said, sharing a photo of two female colleagues, both physicists, in a kayak in Michigan. He then asked AI to generate an image of “two physicists in a kayak in Michigan” – it drew two old white men with grey beards. This bias could prove even more problematic in healthcare. “AI-based bots will not give equally good care to everyone,” he said, noting that it is particularly unsuitable for use in low- and middle-income countries.

“AI will not replace us,” Dekker emphasized. “I don’t believe that the entire radiotherapy care pathway will be taken over by bots, because AI will not be ready for it in 15 years, AI cannot handle new things that humans can do much better. AI will be biased and tell you only things you already knew or that are fake. Don’t believe in it.”

“Can we, should we, will we?”

Next up, Stine Korreman from Aarhus University pointed out that in this year’s ESTRO programme, every single time slot could be covered with a presentation on AI. She cited one poster discussion demonstrating fully automated radiotherapy treatment planning, from scan to plan. “If we are able to do this now, where will be in 2040?”

Korreman demonstrated a foundation model performing real-time image delineation. “This is not trained for this specific purpose, this is just plug-and-play,” she said. “By 2040 AI will have the capability to process all data, all the time, everywhere. This is something humans are not able to do.”

So just because we can, should we? Korreman said that many problems attributed to AI – automation bias, overreliance, overcompliance and so on – are actually related to the humans using the AI. Showing a delineation error made by AI due to different patient positioning, she noted: “I can tell you exactly why it made that mistake and I can retrain and fix the model”. But if a human makes a delineation error, we’ll often have no idea why they did that or how to fix it. “The human brain is a black box more than an AI model,” she emphasized.

Returning to the car analogy, Korreman pointed out that any accident involving a self-driving vehicle is big news. But statistics show that accidents occur far more often in human-driven vehicles, and that most accidents involving self-driving vehicles are actually caused by the human driver it met. “This is a very good reason to go in that direction. You may say AI is stupid, but humans driving cars can be really stupid.”

So yes, we should. But will we? Korreman suggested that today’s ESTRO delegates will not, citing a survey from a pre-meeting course in which 72% thought that radiotherapy cannot totally move to AI-based automation – human oversight will be needed at some key steps. Rather, she said, it will be the younger generation, who are already at ease with AI-based applications, who will drive this. “This will happen, not by us, but by a new generation of people who are not afraid of breaking barriers.”

“Humans are here to stay”

Finally, Eliana Vasquez Osorio from the University of Manchester argued against the motion. She pointed out that the conversation so far was all about treatment optimization and delivery, but the care pathway also includes treatment decision and patient follow-up stages, which involve a large multidisciplinary team.

“None of my esteemed colleagues have been able to actually say that the whole human team is going to be replaced; humans are there and we are going to keep them,” she said. To investigate this further, Vasquez Osorio conferred with various people currently performing patient treatments to understand where and how bots could replace them.

Vasquez Osorio spoke to an oncologist about the “walk into the clinic test”. A patient’s data may indicate use of a standard chemoradiotherapy regime, for example. But then the oncologist sees the patient struggling to walk and decides that this approach is too aggressive. They will talk with the patient, discuss the case with the multidisciplinary team, and integrate all this information to select the final treatment course.

A bot will just use the data to choose a treatment, with no input from the patient and no extra information available.

For a complex reirradiation case, the oncologist may be tasked with deciding between recommending palliative or radical treatment. With the bot, “computer says no,” said Vasquez Osorio. “This speciality will not be replaced by any kind of bot.”

Then there’s the medical physicist, who has many responsibilities, including safety-critical tasks such as quality assurance. Vasquez Osorio described the case of the MCAS flight stabilizing system that, when triggered by a faulty sensor, led to two fatal plane accidents. “We can learn from other disciplines,” she said. “Medical physicists are not going to be replaced by bots.”

Finally, the RTTs talk to the patients each day, noticing any deterioration and triggering appropriate interventions. “The RTTs are empathetic, genuine and non-judgemental,” Vasquez Osorio pointed out. “You are not going to open up your heart to a bot, so you lose extra information.”

Vasquez Osorio explained that a patient’s perception of treatment, and whether they feel it is in their best interest, is connected to building trust with the clinicians. She cited a patient representative who told her: “bots are akin to the patient being on a conveyor belt, treatment is ‘done to them’ not ‘for them’”.

“The question becomes whether an exclusively bot-driven care pathway is best for the patients,” she concluded.

At the close of the session, the motion was opened for an audience vote (with a can of Irn-Bru up for grabs by the winners). The ESTRO delegates voted 83% against the motion – perhaps echoing Korreman’s prediction that “this will happen, but not by us”.

The post Will future radiotherapy be delivered entirely by AI bots? appeared first on Physics World.

A new hydrogel binds to spike proteins in the SARS-CoV-2 virus like “molecular Velcro”, preventing it from interacting with potential host cells and inhibiting infection. According to its US-based developers, the hydrogel forms a multi-layer “mask” that abates the action of the virus in a non-specific way – meaning that, unlike vaccines, it would not need to be updated regularly as the virus evolves. The team say the technology could be developed into a cost-effective nose spray that would help fight the spread of airborne infections.

The new hydrogel is made from chains of protein-forming amino acids called peptides. In the latest study, a team led by biomedical engineer Vivek Kumar of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) engineered these peptides to self-assemble into a functionalized hydrogel containing nanoscale fibres known as fibrils. It is these fibrils that bind to the protein complexes within viruses – in this case, the spike proteins on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Targeted vs non-specific approach

The researchers began working on this project in 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2021 they had engineered the self-assembling peptides to have a “targeting domain” specific to spikes. In some sense, they say, this mechanism was analogous to the way vaccines produce antibodies by targeting specific proteins on the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Over the next few years, as new variants emerged, the researchers optimized their peptides further. Then, while performing a control experiment in live-virus assays – one that involved the hydrogel’s self-assembling domain on its own, without the targeting domain – they observed that some peptides could interact with the charged viral protein coat or viral proteins in a non-specific way. “Interestingly, we also found a synergy (improved viral inhibition) when testing combinations of the just-self-assembling domain and the self-assembling domain plus targeting domain,” Kumar says.

Further investigation showed that the self-assembled fibrils act like “molecular Velcro”, forming a stable fibrous mesh on the virus that is also highly resilient to viral mutations, Kumar adds.

“The ability to design and optimize these assemblies and target novel receptors is truly exciting,” says team member Petr Kral of the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC), “along with the ability to tune densities in functionalized peptides to enhance targeting.”

Simulations and safety tests in laboratory animals

The team tested the fibrils on several SARS-CoV-2 variants – first with computer simulations at UIC, and then in the laboratory on mice and rats via injections and nasal sprays. They found that the treatment inhibited the Alpha and Omicrons variants of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, while the animals exhibited no adverse effects.

While the hydrogel has not yet been tested in humans, Kumar says the early results are promising. “We think this platform could be expanded to a number of other disease-causing viruses, and could potentially rapidly, and cost-effectively, address the dearth of specific drugs/devices on the market for emerging epidemics/pandemics,” he says. He adds that the hydrogel could be “useful as a therapeutic in early stages of a disease or as a prophylactic – a gel sprayed into the nose to prevent the virus from infecting the host more seriously”.

The researchers are now seeking to understand how the fibrils interact with the spike proteins on SARS-CoV-2. In particular, they would like to know whether the infection-inhibiting mechanism is biomechanical in nature. The answer could have important implications for the platform’s versatility. “Drug-resistant pathogens mutate around biochemical modulators, but are they less likely to mutate around a mechanical spear?” Kumar asks rhetorically. “By understanding this fundamental interaction, we want to figure out how to use it against different diseases.”

The team, which also includes scientists from Georgia Tech, the Baylor School of Medicine and Rutgers University, hopes to find partners interested in developing the technology further. “We would like to extend it to other viruses, which we have shown is possible in computational simulations,” Kumar tells Physics World. “We are also exploring expanding the platform to a number of hard-to-treat bacterial and fungal pathogens that we have seen excellent efficacy against.”

The study is detailed in Nature Communications.

The post Antiviral hydrogel stops SARS-CoV-2 in its tracks appeared first on Physics World.

New research has uncovered a social world full of cheating, cooperation, and other intrigues, suggesting that viruses make sense only as members of a community.

Biases against certain groups of people can escalate into acts of violence if left unchecked

The list of conditions required for complex life to emerge on Earth is contentious, poorly understood, and one item longer than it used to be. According to an international team of geoscientists, an unusual lull in the Earth’s magnetic field nearly 600 million years ago may have triggered a rise in the planet’s oxygen levels, thereby allowing large, complex animals to evolve and thrive for the first time. Though evidence for the link is circumstantial, the team say that new measurements of magnetization in 591-million-year-old rocks suggest an important connection between processes occurring deep within the Earth and the appearance of life on its surface.

Scientists believe that the Earth’s magnetic field – including the bubble-like magnetosphere that shields us from the solar wind – stems from a dynamo effect created by molten metal moving inside the planet’s outer core. The strength of this field varies, and between 591 and 565 million years ago, it was almost 30 times weaker than it is today. Indeed, researchers think that in these years, which lie within the geological Ediacaran Period, the field dropped to its lowest-ever point.

Early in the Ediacaran, life on Earth was limited to small, soft-bodied organisms. Between 575 and 565 million years ago, however, fossil records show that lifeforms became significantly larger, more complex and mobile. While previous studies linked this change to an increase in atmospheric and oceanic oxygen levels that occurred around the same time, the cause of this increase was not known.

Weak magnetic field allowed more hydrogen gas to escape

In the latest study, which is published in Communications Earth & Environment, researchers led by geophysicist John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, US, present a hypothesis that links these two phenomena. The weak magnetic field, they argue, could have allowed more hydrogen gas to escape from the atmosphere into space, resulting in a net increase in the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere and oceans. This, in turn, allowed larger, more oxygen-hungry animals to emerge.

To quantify the drop in Earth’s magnetic field, the team used a technique known as single-crystal paleointensity that Tarduno and colleagues invented 25 years ago and later refined. This technique enabled them to measure the magnetization of feldspar plagioclase crystals from a 591-million-year-old rock formation in Passo da Fabiana Gabbros, Brazil. These crystals are common in the Earth’s crust and contain minute magnetic inclusions that record, with high fidelity, the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time they crystallized. They also preserve accurate values of magnetic field strength for billions of years.

Tarduno says it was challenging to find rock formations that would have cooled slowly enough to yield a representative average for the magnetic field, and that also contained crystals suitable for paleointensity analyses. “We were able to find these in Brazil, aided by our colleagues at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,” he says.

The team mounted the samples in quartz holders (which had negligible magnetic moments) and measured their magnetism using a DC SQUID magnetometer at Rochester. This instrument is composed of high-resolution sensing coils housed in a magnetically shielded room with an ambient field of less 200 nT.

Geodynamo remained ultra-weak for at least 26 million years

The team compared its results to those from previous studies of 565-million-year-old anorthosite rocks from the Sept Îles Mafic Intrusive Suite in Quebec, Canada, which also contain feldspar plagioclase crystals. Together, these measurements suggest that the Earth’s geodynamo remained ultra-weak, with a time-averaged field intensity of less than 0.8 x 10²² A m², for least 26 million years. “This timespan allowed the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans to cross a threshold that in turn helped the Ediacaran radiation of animal life,” Tarduno says. “If this is true, it would represent a profound connection between the deep Earth and life. This history could also have implications for the search for life elsewhere.”

The researchers say they need additional records of geomagnetic field strength throughout the Ediacaran, plus the Cryogenian (720 to 635 million years ago) and Cambrian (538.8 to 485.4 million years ago) Periods that bookend it, to better constrain the duration of the ultra-low magnetic fields. “This is crucial for understanding how much hydrogen could be lost from the atmosphere to space, ultimately resulting in the increased oxygenation,” Tarduno tells Physics World.

The post Ancient lull in Earth’s magnetic field may have allowed large animals to evolve appeared first on Physics World.

A vast constellation of celebrities, from Kelly Ripa to the McDonald’s mascot Grimace, have helped push dairy sales.

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Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has a long history as a world cradle of physics. The first experiments in the Soviet Union on nuclear fission were conducted there in the 1930s, and in 1932 the future Nobel-prize-winning physicist Lev Landau founded an influential school of theoretical physics in the city. Over the years, Kharkiv has been visited by influential scientists including Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Paul Ehrenfest.

Kharkiv is still home to many research institutes, but, located just 30 km from the Russian border, the city has been heavily damaged and suffered hundreds of casualties since the Russian invasion that began in February 2022. In the past week, advances made by the Russian forces have put the region under increased pressure, with thousands of civilians fleeing away from the border towards Kharkiv.

I first travelled to Kharkiv in November 2021 as part of a photography project documenting Soviet-era scientific facilities. The Russian army was massing at the border, but I was nevertheless stunned when, having returned home to France, I heard the news of the invasion.

The day after I arrived, explosions rang out in the city centre

I considered abandoning my project, but I felt compelled to document what was happening and in November 2023, I returned to Kharkiv. Though the Ukrainian counter-offensive had pushed back the Russian forces, the city was nevertheless plunged into darkness, the streets deserted. The day after I arrived, explosions rang out in the city centre.

For two weeks, I photographed Kharkiv’s scientific facilities, many of which had been destroyed or badly damaged since my previous visit. I also interviewed and photographed scientists who were continuing to perform their research despite the ongoing war. As the situation in Kharkiv becomes increasingly critical, the pictures I took stand as a record of the effects of the conflict on the people of Ukraine.

Department of Solid State Physics and Condensed Matter, Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, November 2021 and November 2023

Even when I was there in 2021, visiting the old cryogenics laboratory of the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) was like stepping back in time (photo 1). Founded in 1928 as the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute, KIPT is one of the oldest and largest physical science research institutes in Ukraine. New facilities have been built on the outskirts of the city, but the original buildings are still standing and, because of the historical value of the site, a project is underway to convert them into a museum.

When I returned in 2023, the corridors were silent, the heating was shut off and all the doors were closed. However, a few of the offices were still occupied by researchers in KIPT’s Department of Solid State Physics and Condensed Matter (photos 2, 3). During my visit, I also met students from the Kharkiv National University who were visiting with their teacher, Alexander Gapon (photo 4). Their faculty had been damaged in the early days of the fighting, and they had moved lab classes to KIPT so that teaching could continue.

Plasma Physics Institute, Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, November 2023

The Plasma Physics Institute houses two huge stellarators for studying nuclear fusion. These machines confine plasma under high magnetic fields (photo 5), creating the hot, dense conditions necessary for nuclei to fuse.

I met Igor Garkusha, the director of the institute, who showed me where the roof of the facility had been pierced by projectiles during the early days of the Russian invasion. Debris was still scattered everywhere and, in the room housing the stellarators, he held up a piece of shrapnel (photo 6). The roof played its protective role and the stellarators have not suffered any damage, but with research temporarily halted, Garkusha worried that they were at risk of losing skills.

“I never thought the Russians would wage war on us because I have a lot of family and friends on the other side,” Garkusha said. “I attended a nuclear fusion conference in London organized by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in October. There were Russian scientists whom I’ve known for 20 or 30 years, and not one of them spoke to me.”

The Institute for Scintillation Materials, Kharkiv, November 2023

“I can’t complain: we get a lot of orders,” says Borys Grynyov (photo 8), director of the Institute for Scintillation Materials. Scintillation crystals, which emit light when exposed to radiation, are a vital component of particle detectors, and even though some of its buildings have been destroyed, the institute continues to participate in CERN research programmes.

For several months at the beginning of the war, around 50 people – members of staff, and their families, lived in the basement of the facility. The teams were eventually able to move the equipment to better-protected rooms, which allowed the production of the scintillation crystals to resume (photo 9).

Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, November 2023

At around 5.30 a.m. on 19 August 2022 a missile struck a university building of the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute (photo 10). From 8 a.m., Kseniia Minakova, head of the optics and photonics laboratory, searched through the rubble for what could be salvaged. Much of the equipment had been destroyed, but she and her colleagues found some microscopes, welding equipment and computers. After a few days, heavier equipment such as vacuum pumps could be evacuated.

I met Minakova at the institute, where she showed me her small temporary laboratory (photo 11). Her research is dedicated to solar energy and improving heat dissipation in photovoltaic systems. To enable Minakova’s team to continue working, Tulane University in the US, where they have collaborators, donated photovoltaic cells as well as a new 3D printer, screens, oscilloscopes and other equipment.

But what she was most grateful for was at the back of the room, where her team was huddled around a solar simulator donated by a Canadian company (photo 12). “I explained to them what I needed and they came up with a technical solution for our laboratory and completely assembled a new installation for us from scratch. This equipment is worth $60,000!” exclaimed Minakova.

In 2023 she was appointed ambassador of the Optica foundation and a finalist for the L’Oréal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” prize. She has received several offers to work abroad. “I turned them down. My place is here, in Ukraine. If everyone leaves, who will take care of rebuilding our country?”

The post Physics in Ukraine: scientific endeavour lives on despite the Russian invasion appeared first on Physics World.

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In this short video, filmed at the 2024 March Meeting of the American Physical Society earlier this year, Vikrant Mahajan, president of Zurich Instruments USA, outlines the company’s new products to support scientists in quantum computing.

Mahajan explains how Zurich Instruments, which has more than 10 locations around the globe, wants to move quantum computing forward with its products, such as its newly released SHF+ series platform. “Our mission is to help build a practical quantum computer,” he says.

Moritz Kirste, head of business development quantum technologies, then describes the main features of the SHF+ product line, which are the building blocks for its quantum computing control systems. “It provides qubit control and read-out functionality of any chip size from one to hundreds of qubits,” he says.

Next up is Linsey Rodenbach, application scientist quantum technologies, who explains that the SHF+ offers better qubit performance metrics – and therefore higher algorithm fidelities. The new platform has lower noise, which means less measurement-induced dephasing, thereby boosting phase coherence between control pulses, especially for long-lived qubits.

As Rodenbach adds, the SHF+ provides a route for developing high quality qubits or when operating large quantum processing units, with Zurich Instruments partnering with some of the world’s leading labs to ensure that the technical specifcations of the SHF+ provide the desired performance benefits.

Get in touch with their team to discuss your specific requirements and collaborate on advancing quantum technology.

The post Zurich Instruments launch their SHF+ series platform for quantum computing technologies appeared first on Physics World.

"Roughly 1 in 5 U.S. adults report binge drinking at least once a week."