Month: June 2015

Scaling Antimatter

Researchers have produced a record high number of electron-positron pairs, opening exciting opportunities to study extreme astrophysical processes, such as black holes and gamma-ray bursts.

The current lasers are at 500-1000 joules.
10-kilojoule-class lasers would provide 100x higher antimatter yield.
This would be ~100t (10^14) positron pairs.

There are many interesting applications if you can regularly and quickly generate 10^19 positrons in less than 1000 seconds. A 1 gigawatt antimatter ignited nuclear fusion generator becomes possible. 10^19 positrons can be used to trigger deuterium tritium fusion.

Fashion twins

If we’re going to a party, we’ll discuss what to wear like any other couple, except the difference is we want to look the same. Someone once told me that if she and her husband came down wearing the same color top, they’d change. What a shame to be so insecure. We both have very strong identities as individuals and wearing the same clothes doesn’t affect this; clothes don’t make your personality. Instead, dressing the same gives me a lovely feeling of closeness to Donald.

7nm Transistors

As the industry adopts FinFETs as the transistor for 16nm and 14nm, researchers are looking into the limits of FinFETs and solutions for the 7nm node and beyond. 2 approaches, namely Gate-All-Around Nanowire (GAA NW) FETs, which offer significantly better short-channel electrostatics, and quantum-well FinFETs (with SiGe, Ge, or III-V channels), which achieve high carrier mobility, are promising options.