Category Archives: Materials
Unlocking graphene’s spintronic potential through spin-valley coupling
Author: José H. García is a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2).
Few materials have drawn as much attention as graphene, it fascinating attributes such as one-atom thickness and relativistic electrons, and its technological properties […]
Avoiding geological timescales to access low energies in bulk glasses
Common glass, used in windows or bottles, for example, is made by heating a mixture of calcium oxide (lime), sodium carbonate (soda), and silicon (IV) oxide (sand), resulting in a calcium silicate. This silicate is not a crystal but a […]
Bio-inpired self-healing materials
Plants and animals are provided with startling self-healing and defence mechanisms. Think of how trees achieve wound closure after losing a limb through callus formation, or the ability of the chameleon to adapt the colour of the skin according to […]
A route to the directional control of light–matter interactions at the nanoscale
Mobile phones and computers are currently responsible for up to 8% of the electricity use in the world. This figure has been doubling each past decade but nothing prevents it from skyrocketing in the future. Unless we find a way […]
Vibrational spectra of liquids with nanometer spatial resolution
The ability to examine the vibrational spectra of liquids with nanometer spatial resolution will greatly expand the potential to study liquids and liquid interfaces. After all, modern technology, including many manufacturing processes, and science depend on understanding the detailed interactions […]
The role of core electrons in the electronic stopping power of heavy ions
Spacecraft components potentially exposed to different ionic projectiles in space, new materials used in new energy systems or healthy tissues exposed to cancer therapies are all instances where a full comprehension of how the energy of the incoming ions is […]
How to build structures atom by atom using a scanning transmission electron microscope
“What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?” Richard Feynman
Fabrication of matter atom by atom remains a long-standing dream and ultimate goal of nanotechnology, following the famous challenge by Feynman […]
Structurally well-defined boundaries in a fully accessible quantum spin Hall insulator
Imagine that we have a conductor or a semiconductor through which a current is flowing. Then we apply a strong transverse magnetic field. As a result, we can measure a potential difference at right angles to both the current and […]
Topology of disconnected elementary band representations
The revolutionary theory of topological quantum chemistry , a description of the universal global properties of all possible band structures and materials, diagnoses topological phases based on elementary band representations. A set of bands is topological if it lacks […]
Surface-Enhanced Molecular Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy
Chemists have a range of different spectroscopic techniques to study organic molecules. All of these techniques are based on spectra generated by a range of electronic transitions and vibrations, key excitations in matter, the study of which provides information about […]