Digital ‘super-brain’ with a physics education speeds up technology development
Digital ‘super-brain’ with a physics education speeds up technology development
Publish Date: 2026-06-06 16:07:00
Source Domain: www.thebrighterside.news
Designing materials that steer light is a slow kind of trial and error. Each candidate structure must be tested in computer simulations, and every new data point can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to produce. That bottleneck has made one thing clear. Smarter machine learning is useful only if it can learn faster, too.
At Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, researchers say they found a way to do that by giving a neural network something like a physics education before training begins. Instead of forcing the system to discover the laws of electromagnetism on its own from vast amounts of data, they built those laws directly into the model.
The payoff was immediate. “When we fed the super-brain information about the laws of physics, it immediately got much smarter. Our calculations now take one tenth of the time previously required,” said Philippe Tassin, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Chalmers.
That cut a month-long training-data effort down to about three days, according to the team.
Philippe Tassin, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. (CREDIT: Chalmers University of Technology | Anna-Lena Lundqvist)
Where light gets tricky
The work comes from nanophotonics, a field that deals with controlling light on scales smaller than its wavelength. At that size, light does not behave the way it does in everyday lenses or mirrors. That opens new design possibilities, but it also creates severe computational challenges.
Tassin’s group studies artificial optical materials that can do things natural materials cannot. Those materials could help make camera and eyeglass lenses thinner, lighter and more effective. The same design tools could also matter for quantum technologies.
Together with researchers at Chalmers’ Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience, where Sweden’s first larger quantum computer is being built, the team is studying whether nanostructured materials can…
