CROSS-WIRES

Digital wires

E lectrical wires transport energy and information and often both. For example, electrical power cords deliver electrical energy from wall outlets to computers, whereas Ethernet cable transports information in the form of electrical pulses from the internet modem to the computer and back. USB cables are used to both charge the battery of MP3 players and to load digital music on the player. Desp...

Quantum Wires

Crossed wires: interpreters, translators, and bilingual workers in cross-language research.

Increasingly, researchers are undertaking studies involving people who do not speak the same language as they do. Sociologists have long argued that language constructs the social world at the same time as it describes it. However, the implications of this for cross-language research are rarely considered. Employing interpreters/translators and "cultural brokers" in research raises methodologic...

Phase slips in superconducting wires with nonuniform cross section: A numerical evaluation using the string method

We employ the string method to numerically evaluate the thermally activated phase slips in one-dimensional superconducting wires with nonuniform cross section. A defect with reduced cross-sectional area opens up a channel for phase-slip transition, for which the free-energy barrier and the preexponential factor associated with the transition rate are numerically calculated. The contribution of ...

Optical 'shorting wires'.

Connecting lumped circuit elements in a conventional circuit is usually accomplished by conducting wires that act as conduits for the conduction currents with negligible potential drops. More challenging, however, is to extend these concepts to optical nanocircuit elements. Here, following our recent development of optical lumped circuit elements, we show how a special class of nanowaveguides f...