Innovative Technology for Building Ultralow-Loss Integrated Photonic Circuits
Encoding information into light, and transmitting it through optical fibers lies at the core of optical communications. With an incredibly low loss of 0.2 dB/km,…
EPFL News
New Nanotransistors Keep Their Cool at High Voltages – Perform Highly Efficient Power Conversion
Power converters are the little-known systems that make electricity so magical. They are what allow us to plug in our computers, lamps and televisions and…
Retinal Implants Equipped With 10,500 Electrodes to Give Artificial Vision to the Blind
Being able to make blind people see again sounds like the stuff of miracles or even science fiction. And it has always been one of…
Emergent Nonlinear Phenomena: Optical Frequency Combs Found a New Dimension
Periodic pulses of light forming a comb in the frequency domain are widely used for sensing and ranging. The key to the miniaturization of this…
Better Understanding Aerosols and the Reasons Behind Arctic Amplified Warming
It’s clear that rising greenhouse gas emissions are the main driver of global warming. But on a regional level, several other factors are at play….
Tragic Dyatlov Pass Incident: Using Science to Explore One of the Greatest Mysteries in Soviet History
In early October 2019, when an unknown caller rang EPFL professor Johan Gaume’s cell phone, he could hardly have imagined that he was about to…
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Helps Unravel the Mysteries of Sleep
Our state of consciousness changes significantly during stages of deep sleep, just as it does in a coma or under general anesthesia. Scientists have long…
New Metamaterial Features Mechanical Properties That Can Be Reprogrammed
Over the past 20 years, scientists have been developing metamaterials, or materials that don’t occur naturally and whose mechanical properties result from their designed structure…
AI Boosted by Parallel Convolutional Light-Based Processors
The exponential growth of data traffic in our digital age poses some real challenges on processing power. And with the advent of machine learning and…
“Game Changer” Perovskite Can Detect High-Energy Gamma Rays
Perovskites are materials made up of organic compounds bound to a metal. Propelled into the forefront of materials’ research because of their structure and properties,…
Counter-Intuitive Quantum Mechanics: State of Vibration That Exists Simultaneously at Two Different Times
When Light and Atoms Share a Common Vibe An especially counter-intuitive feature of quantum mechanics is that a single event can exist in a state…
Transistor-Integrated Microfluidic Cooling for More Powerful Electronic Chips
Managing the heat generated in electronics is a huge problem, especially with the constant push to reduce the size and pack as many transistors as…
Virus-Like “Jumping” DNA Regulates Human Neurons
The human genome contains over 4.5 million sequences of DNA called “transposable elements,” these virus-like entities that “jump” around and help regulate gene expression. They…
Titanate Nanowire Mask Filter Can Kill Bacteria and Viruses Including SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19
Filter “paper” made from titanium oxide nanowires is capable of trapping pathogens and destroying them with light. This discovery by an EPFL laboratory could be…
The Difference Between Success and Failure: (Neuro)science of Getting and Staying Motivated
There is no question that motivation is one of the hardest and yet important factors in life. It’s the difference between success and failure, goal-setting…
Using Air to Amplify Light in Hollow-Core Optical Fibers
“The idea had been going around my head for about 15 years, but I never had the time or the resources to do anything about…
Astrophysicists Construct Most Complete 3D Map of the Universe, Fill Gaps in Cosmological History
An international consortium of scientists has analyzed, as part of a vast program of cosmological surveys, several million galaxies and quasars, thus retracing a more…
Blocking Sugar Metabolism Slows the Growth of Lung Cancer Tumors
Treatments that block two sugar-transporting proteins could help slow the growth of lung tumors, new research from EPFL suggests. Blocking a pair of sugar-transporting proteins…
