(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)
In the 1970s, scientists began exploring ways to extend electronic frequency mixing into the terahertz range using diodes. While these early efforts showed promise, progress stalled for decades. Recently, however, advances in nanotechnology have reignited this area of research. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an electronic frequency mixer for signal detection that operates beyond 0.350 petahertz using tiny nanoantennae. These nanoantennae can mix different frequencies of light, enabling analysis of signals oscillating orders of magnitude faster than the fastest signal accessible to conventional electronics.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the University of Minnesota, Auburn University, Purdue University, the City University of New York, Vanderbilt University, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in India, Zhejiang University in China, Kyung Hee University in South Korea, and Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain have provided insight into how light, electrons, and crystal vibrations interact in materials. The researchers studied planar polaritons – hybrid particles created from the interaction between light and matter – in two-dimensional (2D) crystals. The research has implications for developing on-chip architectures for quantum information processing and thermal management.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated a technology that uses DNA to store data. The new technology is made possible by recent techniques that have enabled the creation of soft polymer materials that have unique morphologies. “Specifically, we have created polymer structures that we call dendricolloids – they start at the microscale, but branch off from each other in a hierarchical way to create a network of nanoscale fibers,” says Orlin Velev, one of the researchers involved in this study. “The ability to distinguish DNA information from the nanofibers it’s stored on allows us to perform many of the same functions you can do with electronic devices,” says Kevin Lin, another researcher involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation)
Physicists from Purdue University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories have levitated a fluorescent nanodiamond and spun it at incredibly high speeds (up to 1.2 billion times per minute). The fluorescent diamond emitted and scattered multicolor lights in different directions as it rotated. When illuminated by a green laser, the nanodiamond emitted red light, which was used to read out its electron spin states. An additional infrared laser was shone at the levitated nanodiamond to monitor its rotation. Like a disco ball, as the nanodiamond rotated, the direction of the scattered infrared light changed, carrying the rotation information of the nanodiamond.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Scientists from Yale University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have developed a systematic approach to understanding how energy is lost from the materials that make up qubits. Energy loss inhibits the performance of these quantum computer building blocks, so determining its sources can help bring researchers closer to designing quantum computers. To conduct this work, the scientists used electron microscopes from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a DOE-funded user facility at BNL.