Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum physics
Graphene, a single sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb, was first isolated in 2004, and for years its electrons were treated as nearly independent travellers. That changed in 2018, when two sheets twisted by a “magic” angle produced almost flat energy bands, in which an electron’s energy hardly depends on its motion, together […]
Chemical engineering • Condensed matter • Environment • Materials
Materials that glow are part of our daily lives, and even if we rarely notice them, their use nowadays is widespread. They light up the screens we look at for hours and the light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in our homes; they enable biologists and physicians to explore cells, tissues and molecules using fluorescence microscopes; they turn […]
A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and the University of Notre Dame has broken the world record for optical switching speed in quantum well LEDs. The gallium nitride micro-LED device has an optical modulation bandwidth of 2.75 gigahertz while consuming just 25 milliwatts of power. Its design was optimized […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials
Graphene, a honeycomb sheet of carbon atoms just one atom thick, was first isolated in 2004 with adhesive tape and a lump of graphite, work that earned a Nobel Prize in 2010. Large sheets of graphene conduct electricity superbly, but they are not magnetic. Shrink a piece to a few nanometres, however, and its boundary […]
Lithium and sodium are neighbours in the periodic table. Both are alkali metals, both have a single electron in their outer shell, and both can be used to shuttle ions between two electrodes to store and release electrical energy. At first sight, replacing lithium with sodium in a rechargeable battery might therefore seem straightforward. There […]
Scientists have discovered a class of metal that can unexpectedly resist extreme cold using an unusual mechanism. Normally such temperatures would make similar materials brittle and vulnerable to breaking. The findings point to new principles for designing materials for cryogenic environments. An international team led by University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and […]
Condensed matter • DIPC Advanced materials • Materials • Quantum chemistry • Quantum physics
In 2004, physicists isolated graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. It launched the study of two-dimensional (2D) materials: crystals a few atoms thick in which electrons are confined to a plane and can behave quite differently from those in ordinary solids. The family of known and predicted 2D crystals has since grown […]
Scientists have developed remarkably long, precisely patterned molecular threads that could open new possibilities for designing advanced materials. The scientists also discovered these threads — called supramolecular polymers — can dramatically enhance brain cell activity. Built from self-assembling molecules, the longest threads reach dimensions greater than the diameter of a cell. By molecular standards, they […]
In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled mercury to a few degrees above absolute zero and watched its electrical resistance vanish. Lead soon joined the list of superconductors, losing its resistance below about 7.2 kelvin. A full explanation arrived in 1957: electrons bind into Cooper pairs that move together as one collective state below a critical […]
When light or sound bounces around inside an oddly shaped room, its reflections can quickly become difficult to predict. But new research led by scientists at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) shows that waves can behave very differently when they travel through a special class of materials. The […]