Category archives: Materials

The classic chemical garden experiment is a staple of introductory chemistry, where colorful, plant-like structures sprout from metal salt crystals dropped into a solution of sodium silicate. While these vibrant tubes look like biological life, they are entirely inorganic, driven by the physics of osmosis and the chemistry of precipitation. For decades, scientists have admired […]

Author: Jordi Diaz Marcos, CCiTUB , Universitat de Barcelona As good citizens, we diligently fill the recycling bins provided by our local authorities with all manner of plastic trays, boxes, bottles and bags. But as these bins fill up quicker and quicker each week, an awkward question arises: is all this effort actually doing any […]

Imagine cooling a liquid so fast it turns into glass: a solid that’s jumbled inside, unlike neat crystal lattices. In 1948, Walter Kauzmann noticed a puzzle. As liquids cool, their entropy (a measure of disorder) drops faster than in crystals. Below a certain temperature, a supercooled liquid would have less entropy than the crystal, implying […]

When we peel a crystal down to its very last layer, the physics governing its behavior undergoes a radical shift. This transition from the bulk (three-dimensional) to the two-dimensional limit is where some of the most exotic phenomena in condensed matter physics emerge. Among these, Titanium Diselenide, or TiSe₂, has long fascinated researchers because of […]

When we study solid-state physics, we usually begin with crystals. In a crystal, atoms repeat in a strict and regular pattern, much like tiles on a bathroom floor. Because every small region looks the same as every other, electrons move through a predictable landscape. This repeating order is the reason we can explain electricity, magnetism […]

A Univerity of Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and plasma physics […]

The material at the heart of the digital revolution, silicon, is now a leading candidate for building large-scale quantum computers. This strategy leverages the most mature and powerful manufacturing technology on Earth to control the fundamental quantum property of an electron: its spin. Recent breakthroughs in silicon-based spin qubits have demonstrated gate fidelities that meet […]

Most of the electronic devices we use every day, from smartphones to solar panels, depend on electrons moving smoothly through crystal structures. In recent years, however, researchers have discovered that stacking extremely thin materials in carefully chosen ways can produce completely new types of behavior that never appear in ordinary bulk materials. One of the […]

Carbon is one of the most versatile elements in the periodic table. Beyond the familiar forms of graphite and diamond lies a rich family of carbon structures with surprising and useful properties. Among these, graphene, a single two-dimensional (2D) allotrope consisting in a layer of carbon atoms arranged in a perfect hexagonal lattice, has captivated […]

Authors: Mouna Reda, Post doctorate fellow, Department of Civil Engineering, McMaster University and Samir Chidiac, Professor, Civil Engineering, McMaster University As winter approaches, Canada’s roads, bridges, sidewalks and buildings are facing a familiar problem: cracks caused by large temperature swings. These cracks weaken infrastructure and cost millions to repair every year. But what if concrete […]