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Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Ultra-efficient LED, Developed By Student, Will Vastly Improve LCD Screens, Conserve Energy

In recent years, light emitting diodes (LEDs) have begun to change the way we see the world. Now, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student has developed a new type of LED that could allow for their widespread use as light sources for liquid crystal displays (LCDs) on everything from televisions and computers to cell phones and cameras.

Martin Schubert, a doctoral student in electrical, computer, and systems engineering, has developed the first polarized LED, an innovation that could vastly improve LCD screens, conserve energy, and usher in the next generation of ultra-efficient LEDs.

Next Generation of LEDs

Schubert’s polarized LED advances current LED technology in its ability to better control the direction and polarization of the light being emitted. With better control over the light, less energy is wasted producing scattered light, allowing more light to reach its desired location. This makes the polarized LED perfectly suited as a backlighting unit for any kind of LCD, according to Schubert. Its focused light will produce images on the display that are more colorful, vibrant, and lifelike, with no motion artifacts.

Schubert first discovered that traditional LEDs actually produce polarized light, but existing LEDs did not capitalize on the light’s polarization. Armed with this information, he devised an optics setup around the LED chip to enhance the polarization, creating the first polarized LED.

The invention could advance the effort to combine the power and environmental soundness of LEDs with the beauty and clarity of LCDs. Schubert expects that his polarized LED could quickly become commonplace in televisions and monitors around the world, replacing widely used fluorescent lights that are less efficient and laden with mercury. His innovation also could be used for street lighting, high-contrast imaging, sensing, and free-space optics, he said.

Schubert’s innovation has earned him the $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize.

Tuesday, 28 February 2012

Two-Dimensional High-Temperature Superconductor Discovered

Scientists at Brookhaven Lab have discovered a state of two-dimensional (2D) fluctuating superconductivity in a high-temperature superconductor with a particular arrangement of electrical charges known as "stripes."

The finding was uncovered during studies of directional dependence in the material's electron-transport and magnetic properties. In the 2D plane, the material acts as a superconductor - conducts electricity with no resistance - at a significantly higher temperature than in the 3D state.

"The results provide many insights into the interplay between the stripe order and superconductivity, which may shed light on the mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity," said Brookhaven physicist Qiang Li.

Understanding the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity is one of the outstanding scientific issues in condensed matter physics, Li said. Understanding this mechanism could lead to new strategies for increasing the superconducting transition temperature of other superconductors to make them more practical for applications such as electrical transmission lines.

"As electricity demand increases, the challenge to the national electricity grid to provide reliable power will soon grow to crisis levels," Li said. "Superconductors offer powerful opportunities for restoring the reliability of the power grid and increasing its capacity and efficiency by providing reactive power reserves against blackouts, and by generating and transmitting electricity."


This research was presented at The March 2008 American Physical Society Meeting in New Orleans, La., March 10 -14

Replacing electricity with light: First physical 'metatronic' circuit created

The technological world of the 21st century owes a tremendous amount to advances in electrical engineering, specifically, the ability to finely control the flow of electrical charges using increasingly small and complicated circuits. And while those electrical advances continue to race ahead, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are pushing circuitry forward in a different way, by replacing electricity with light.

"Looking at the success of electronics over the last century, I have always wondered why we should be limited to electric current in making circuits," said Nader Engheta, professor in the electrical and systems engineering department of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. "If we moved to shorter wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum -- like light -- we could make things smaller, faster and more efficient."

Different arrangements and combinations of electronic circuits have different functions, ranging from simple light switches to complex supercomputers. These circuits are in turn built of different arrangements of circuit elements, like resistors, inductors and capacitors, which manipulate the flow of electrons in a circuit in mathematically precise ways. And because both electric circuits and optics follow Maxwell's equations -- the fundamental formulas that describe the behavior of electromagnetic fields -- Engheta's dream of building circuits with light wasn't just the stuff of imagination. In 2005, he and his students published a theoretical paper outlining how optical circuit elements could work.

Now, he and his group at Penn have made this dream a reality, creating the first physical demonstration of "lumped" optical circuit elements. This represents a milestone in a nascent field of science and engineering Engheta has dubbed "metatronics."

Engheta's research, which was conducted with members of his group in the electrical and systems engineering department, Yong Sun, Brian Edwards and Andrea Alù, was published in the journal Nature Materials.

In electronics, the "lumped" designation refers to elements that can be treated as a black box, something that turns a given input to a perfectly predictable output without an engineer having to worry about what exactly is going on inside the element every time he or she is designing a circuit.

"Optics has always had its own analogs of elements, things like lenses, waveguides and gratings," Engheta said, "but they were never lumped. Those elements are all much larger than the wavelength of light because that's all that could be easily built in the old days. For electronics, the lumped circuit elements were always much smaller than the wavelength of operation, which is in the radio or microwave frequency range."

Nanotechnology has now opened that possibility for lumped optical circuit elements, allowing construction of structures that have dimensions measured in nanometers. In this experiment's case, the structure was comb-like arrays of rectangular nanorods made of silicon nitrite.

The "meta" in "metatronics" refers to metamaterials, the relatively new field of research where nanoscale patterns and structures embedded in materials allow them to manipulate waves in ways that were previously impossible. Here, the cross-sections of the nanorods and the gaps between them form a pattern that replicates the function of resistors, inductors and capacitors, three of the most basic circuit elements, but in optical wavelengths.

"If we have the optical version of those lumped elements in our repertoire, we can actually make designs similar to what we do in electronics but now for operation with light," Engheta said. "We can build a circuit with light."

In their experiment, the researchers illuminated the nanorods with an optical signal, a wave of light in the mid-infrared range. They then used spectroscopy to measure the wave as it passed through the comb. Repeating the experiment using nanorods with nine different combinations of widths and heights, the researchers showed that the optical "current" and optical "voltage" were altered by the optical resistors, inductors and capacitors with parameters corresponding to those differences in size.

"A section of the nanorod acts as both an inductor and resistor, and the air gap acts as a capacitor," Engheta said.

Beyond changing the dimensions and the material the nanorods are made of, the function of these optical circuits can be altered by changing the orientation of the light, giving metatronic circuits access to configurations that would be impossible in traditional electronics.

This is because a light wave has polarizations; the electric field that oscillates in the wave has a definable orientation in space. In metatronics, it is that electric field that interacts and is changed by elements, so changing the field's orientation can be like rewiring an electric circuit.

When the plane of the field is in line with the nanorods, as in Figure A, the circuit is wired in parallel and the current passes through the elements simultaneously. When the plane of the electric field crosses both the nanorods and the gaps, as in Figure B, the circuit is wired in series and the current passes through the elements sequentially.

"The orientation gives us two different circuits, which is why we call this 'stereo-circuitry,'" Engheta said. "We could even have the wave hit the rods obliquely and get something we don't have in regular electronics: a circuit that's neither in series or in parallel but a mixture of the two."

This principle could be taken to an even higher level of complexity by building nanorod arrays in three dimensions. An optical signal hitting such a structure's top would encounter a different circuit than a signal hitting its side. Building off their success with basic optical elements, Engheta and his group are laying the foundation for this kind of complex metatronics.

"Another reason for success in electronics has to do with its modularity," he said. "We can make an infinite number of circuits depending on how we arrange different circuit elements, just like we can arrange the alphabet into different words, sentences and paragraphs.

"We're now working on designs for more complicated optical elements," Engheta said. "We're on a quest to build these new letters one by one."

This work was supported in part by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Andrea Alù is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Thursday, 16 February 2012

World's smallest on-chip low-pass filter developed

A research team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore has successfully designed the world's smallest on-chip low-pass filter which is 1,000 times smaller than existing off-chip filters.

A low-pass filter is a circuit that allows low-frequency signals to pass through while reducing unwanted high-frequency signals from passing through. Compared to existing off-chip filters, which are discrete and bulky components, on-chip filters occupy a small area on integrated circuit chips, which can be found in portable devices such as mobile phones, laptops, vehicle-mounted radars, as well as speed guns used in traffic monitoring.

The successful completion of this research project was announced at the official opening of VIRTUS, the new Integrated Circuit Design Centre of Excellence, which was launched by NTU and the Economic Development Board just 10 months ago.

Wednesday, 15 February 2012

I had an recruitment process with one of the accountable company with India,
I think, what they are doing is just making the bad impression over the students, because for the training purpose they are asking for 75001 Rs...!!!
Salary less than 14999..!!
They just treat that they only the company that will hire the students..
No one would be able to join the company except than the person in very much need.
Better is that guys that you apply for ISRO or other central recruitment..
Here is the Good job opportunity for ME/EC students.

http://www.isac.gov.in/CentralBE/advt.jsp

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

I just started adding my latest image captures..Check it out in the My Photography page..