Nobel laureate presents school science project

Operations on 12 December, 2012

Posted on behalf of the University of New South Wales

It’s not every day that school students get to present their science project to a major scientific conference, and rarer still to receive a prize for it from a Nobel Laureate.

That’s the happy experience today for a team of four Year 11 students from Gosford High School, who have won a national competition conducted by UNSW and the Australian Institute of Physics.

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Accurate time with light and designing the NBN

Operations on 11 December, 2012

A new, cheaper way to deliver accurate time across Australia: instead of using hydrogen maser clocks costing hundreds of thousands of dollars we can bounce signals through the national’s optical fibre network according to physics leaders speaking today and tomorrow.

Also today at the national physics congress in Sydney, meet the man whose job it is to figure out how to build the NBN.

And hear about the magic of thermal plasmas, from safer arc welding to saving the ozone layer.

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Single-atom writer a landmark for quantum computing

Operations on 20 September, 2012

Posted on behalf of the University of New South Wales

A research team led by Australian engineers has created the first working quantum bit based on a single atom in silicon, opening the way to ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future.

In a landmark paper published today in the journal Nature, the team describes how it was able to both read and write information using the spin, or magnetic orientation, of an electron bound to a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon chip.

“For the first time, we have demonstrated the ability to represent and manipulate data on the spin to form a quantum bit, or ‘qubit’,  the basic unit of data for a quantum computer,” says Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak. “This really is the key advance towards realising a silicon quantum computer based on single atoms.”

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More efficient solar cells with quantum dots

Science in Public on 21 August, 2012

Dr Baohua Jia Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia The global race to develop high efficiency, low cost solar energy is fierce. And Baohua Jia and her colleagues are front runners. Conventional solar cells are efficient, but thick a…

The Australian Synchrotron helps its big brother in Geneva

Operations on 11 July, 2012

The synchrotron’s intense electron beam contributes to the enhancement of the Large Hadron Collider and the design of future accelerators.

The discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle will see the international research effort shift focus to study its unique characteristics – and it is here that Australia’s Synchrotron is playing a collaborative role with CERN. Read More about The Australian Synchrotron helps its big brother in Geneva

Oz research of note, 27 November, 2011

Operations on 28 November, 2011

Tools once used just to diagnose human diseases are being used to save coral reefs; depression patients will be able to monitor their mental health using a computer and a bodybuilder’s health supplement could be the key to treating a life-threatening muscular dystrophy affecting hundreds of Australian children.

These are just some of the interesting stories that emerged from Australian research published in the last week.  Find over a dozen other stories below.

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