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Nanolaser Chameleon

04.07.2018

Inspired by nature, researchers at Northwestern University (USA) have developed a new nanolaser that changes colors using the same mechanism as a chameleon.

The chameleon can easily change the color of the body and thereby merge with the environment. What makes this color game happen? Due to the redistribution of pigments of four colors, which are located in special "branched" cells (that is, these cells have processes) - chromatophores. These pigments are known to absorb visible light in a narrow spectral range. However, this is not the only mechanism that the chameleon uses. A few years ago, Swiss scientists discovered that other pigment cells, iridophores, also play an important role in color change, which, on the contrary, do not absorb, but reflect light. These cells contain crystalline purines, mainly guanine nanocrystals, which are organized into a well-structured lattice. Changing the distance between nanocrystals (lattice pitch) leads to a change in skin color. Scientists from the USA took the second mechanism as a basis for their new laser.

In the same way that a chameleon controls the distance between nanocrystals on its skin, the laser changes the size of the periodic lattice of metal nanoparticles located on a flexible polymer matrix. When the matrix is stretched, the nanoparticles move farther apart, and when, on the contrary, it is compressed, the nanoparticles approach each other. Due to such actions, the wavelength of the light emitted by the laser changes, and, accordingly, its color changes.

The development of American scientists can be used to create advanced flexible optical displays in smartphones and TVs, portable photonic devices and ultra-sensitive sensors that measure voltage.

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Maxwell's Information-Eating Quantum Demon Created 31.07.2018

Instead of receiving information about the state of the system, a device or observer acting as Maxwell's demon can destroy it irreversibly.

Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment, which consists in the fact that a certain device (demon) is able to separate fast moving molecules from slow ones and thereby extract heat from a cold gas, cooling it even more. In this case, it was shown that the device may not do any work, and as a result, the second law of thermodynamics is allegedly violated, since the entropy in the system decreases.

Although the demon can consume energy by measuring the speed of a molecule, in some cases it can avoid increasing entropy if it writes the measurements to memory, making the process thermodynamically reversible. However, it is shown that sooner or later the device will run out of memory resources, and it will be forced to erase old data, which is already irreversible, which means that entropy will eventually increase.

Scientists set up an experiment to find out how information behaves in the case of Maxwell's quantum demon, that is, a device that tries to measure the characteristic of a quantum system. The researchers made weak measurements of a qubit - a system that is in a superposition of two states - an excited state and a ground state. For weak measurements, the system changes its quantum state insignificantly, when, under ordinary observations, the superposition 'breaks down' to one of two states.

In the experiment, scientists tried to extract information from a qubit implemented as a transmon superconducting device. In this case, the superposition of states turned out to be undisturbed, although it could change in an unpredictable way. It turned out that in this case, information about the state of the system became negative, that is, by the end of the experiment, the experimenters knew less about the system than before.

According to the scientists, the results of the study show that extracting information from a quantum computer can be a difficult task, as you need to learn how to avoid losing it.

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