Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have made a leap in semiconductor technology by designing a compact silicon semiconductor chip that integrates both electronic and photonic elements.

A team at the University of Sydney and Microsoft, in collaboration with Stanford University in the US, has miniaturised a component that is essential for the scale-up of quantum computing. The work constitutes the first practical application of a new phase of matter, first discovered in 2006, the so-called topological insulators. Beyond the familiar phases of matter - solid, liquid, or gas - topological insulators are materials that operate ...

Researchers at the University of Sydney have applied quantum techniques to understanding the electrolysis of water, which is the application of an electric current to H2O to produce the constituent elements hydrogen and oxygen. They found that electrons can 'tunnel' through barriers in aqueous solutions away from the electrodes, neutralising ions of impurities in that water. This can be detected in changes in current, which has applications ...

  Biomedical engineers from the University of Sydney and the United States collaborated on the development of the potentially life-saving surgical glue, called MeTro. MeTro’s high elasticity makes it ideal for sealing wounds in body tissues that continually expand and relax – such as lungs, hearts and arteries – that are otherwise at risk of re-opening.

Researchers from the ARC Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) in the University of Sydney's Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology have made a breakthrough achieving radio frequency signal control at sub-nanosecond time scales on a chip-scale optical device. RF is a particular range of electromagnetic wave frequencies, widely used for communications and radar signals. The work should impact the cur...

Infra-red technology could become easy-to-use and cheap, potentially saving millions of dollars in defence and other areas using sensing devices, and boosting applications of technology to a host of new areas, such as agriculture. Infra-red devices are used for improved vision through fog and for night vision and for observations not possible with visible light; high-quality detectors cost approximately $100,000 (including the device at the Unive...

With enough computing effort most contemporary security systems will be broken. But a research team at the University of Sydney has made a major breakthrough in generating single photons (light particles), as carriers of quantum information in security systems. The collaboration involving physicists at the CUDOS, an ARC Centre of Excellence headquartered in the School of Physics, and electrical engineers from the School of Electrical and Inf...

How did Madagascar once slot next to India? Where was Australia a billion years ago? Cloud-based virtual globes developed by a team led by University of Sydney geologists mean anyone with a smartphone, laptop or computer can now visualise, with unprecedented speed and ease of use, how the Earth evolved geologically. The globes have been gradually made available since September 2014.