On 8 October 2013, following the discovery at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider of a new particle that appeared to be the long-sought Higgs boson predicted by the theory, it was announced that Peter Higgs and François Englert had been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. But they were the survivors of the bunch of […]
A region containing a maximum of potential that prevents a particle on one side of it from passing to the other side is called a potential barrier. The net in a tennis court is in a certain way a potential barrier, as the ball needs to have kinetic energy in excess of the height of […]
The concept of vector should be familiar: a quantity for which both magnitude and direction must be stated. This compares with a scalar quantity, where direction is not applicable, like temperature in a precise point. But, what if the magnitude varies with the direction? A vector would be a particular case, with only one direction […]
The so-called van der Waals materials consist of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces. After the isolation of graphene, the field of two-dimensional van der Waals materials has experienced an explosive growth and new families of two-dimensional systems and block-layered bulk materials, such as tetradymite-like topological insulators – electronic materials that have […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
Controlling electron waves by harnessing phase-coherence and interference effects is a cornerstone for future nanoelectronics or quantum computing. To this end, design of platforms with well-defined, narrow, and low-loss propagation channels is essential. Nanoporous graphene (NPG) holds great potential for distributing and controlling currents on the nanoscale. But the effects derived from the wave nature […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
Every year the amount of data produced is of the order of magnitude of the Avogadro’s constant, thus 6.028×1023. This trend is supposed to increase even more in the next future. This implies that more and more special metals will be needed. The point is: what might happen if the resources used for manufacturing common […]
One of the ultimate goals in surface science is to comprehend the fundamental processes that make that surface reactions need less than a picosecond (10-12 s) to occur. This means understanding what is happening at the scale of femtoseconds, that is, measuring things that take some tens or hundreds of 10-15 seconds to occur. To […]
Topological materials have special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. Such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Topological materials behave like an ordinary insulator in the bulk but have conducting states on their boundaries, i.e., edges or […]
Nature is a source of inspiration for scientists. If the efficiency of natural processes efficiency has been honed by billions of years of evolution, it seems reasonable that the best way to achieve some process is to try and mimic what nature has already come up with. This is the case with photosynthesis, a process […]
Light waves spread and bend as they pass through an aperture or round the edge of a barrier. This is a well-known phenomenon called diffraction. Diffraction imposes a limit to the size of objects that we can observe sharply using light of a given wavelength, for a given microscope will have a minimum aperture, and […]