Nanoscale worlds sometimes resemble macroscale roller-coaster style hills, placed at the tip of a series of hexagons. Surprisingly, these nanohills stem from the self-organisation of particles - the very particles that have been eroded and subsequently redeposited following the bombardment of semi-conductors...
Shaping the hilly landscapes of a semi-conductor nanoworld
read more "Shaping the hilly landscapes of a semi-conductor nanoworld"
Plasmonic material could bring ultrafast all-optical communications
Researchers have created a new "plasmonic oxide material" that could make possible devices for optical communications that are at least 10 times faster than conventional technologies. In optical communications, laser pulses are used to transmit information along fiber-optic cables for telephone service, the Internet and cable television. Researchers...
How to look for a few good catalysts
Two key physical phenomena take place at the surfaces of materials: catalysis and wetting. A catalyst enhances the rate of chemical reactions; wetting refers to how liquids spread across a surface. Now researchers at MIT and other institutions have found that these two processes, which had been considered unrelated, are in fact closely linked. The...
Black phosphorus could replace silicon computer chips
Silicon Valley in Northern California got its nickname from the multitude of computer chip manufacturers that sprung up in the surrounding area in the 1980’s. Despite its ubiquity as a chip building material, silicon may be facing some competition from a new version of an old substance. Researchers working at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center...
A cost-effective solution to tuned graphene production
Mario Hofmann is holding an example set up of the electrochemical synthesis. Today (30 July), in the journal ("Controlling the properties of graphene produced by electrochemical exfoliation"), a team of researchers report that they have developed a simple electrochemical approach which allows defects to intentionally be created in the graphene, altering...
Sol-gel capacitor dielectric offers record-high energy storage
Posted: Using a hybrid silica sol-gel material and self-assembled monolayers of a common fatty acid, researchers have developed a new capacitor dielectric material that provides an electrical energy storage capacity rivaling certain batteries, with both a high energy density and high power density. Samples of the new hybrid sol-gel material are shown...
Controlling phase changes in solids
Rewritable CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs owe their existence to phase-change materials, those materials that change their internal order when heated and whose structures can be switched back and forth between their crystalline and amorphous phases. Phase-change materials have even more exciting applications on the horizon, but our limited ability to...
Making the new silicon
An exotic material called gallium nitride (GaN) is poised to become the next semiconductor for power electronics, enabling much higher efficiency than silicon. Shown here is a prototype laptop power adapter made by Cambridge Electronics using GaN transistors. At 1.5 cubic inches in diameter, this is the smallest laptop power adapter ever made. In...
Graphene supercurrents go ballistic
Researchers with Europe's Graphene Flagship have demonstrated superconducting electric currents in the two-dimensional material graphene that bounce between sheet edges without scattering. This first direct observation of the ballistic mirroring of electron waves in a 2D system with supercurrents could lead to the use of graphene-based Josephson junctions...
Spins in graphene with a hedgehog texture
At a surface or interface the electron spin can form specific patterns but it remains in the surface plane. Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB) researchers have now succeeded in turning the spin out of the plane, and they explain why this is a principle property. The results were published on 27. July 2015 in ("Tunable Fermi level and hedgehog spin texture...
Asymmetric optical-invisibility camouflage
A joint research team from RIKEN and Tokyo Institute of Technology has constructed the design theory of asymmetric invisibility camouflage devices ("Optical Lattice Model Toward Nonreciprocal Invisibility Cloaking"). Optical invisibility camouflage (or invisibility cloaking) is a technology to make an object seem invisible by causing incident light...
Reshaping the solar spectrum to turn light to electricity
When it comes to installing solar cells, labor cost and the cost of the land to house them constitute the bulk of the expense. The solar cells -- made often of silicon or cadmium telluride -- rarely cost more than 20 percent of the total cost. Solar energy could be made cheaper if less land had to be purchased to accommodate solar panels, best achieved...
Wafer-thin material heralds future of wearable technology
UOW’s Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM) has successfully pioneered a way to construct a flexible, foldable and lightweight energy storage device that provides the building blocks for next-generation batteries needed to power wearable electronics and implantable medical devices...
Superconducting qubit and magnetic sphere hybrid
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated that it is possible to exchange a quantum bit, the minimum unit of information used by quantum computers, between a superconducting quantum-bit circuit and a quantum in a magnet called a magnon ("Coherent coupling between a ferromagnetic magnon and a superconducting qubit"). This result is expected...
Superfast fluorescence sets new speed record
Researchers have developed an ultrafast light-emitting device that can flip on and off 90 billion times a second and could form the basis of optical computing. At its most basic level, your smart phone's battery is powering billions of transistors using electrons to flip on and off billions of times per second. But if microchips could use photons instead...
The future with nanoionics
Living systems such as the brain conduct electric signals via ions – charged atoms or molecules – rather than electrons. Like the living ones, artificial systems that run on ions could in some ways be more efficient than today’s electronic devices. Nanoionics is a new area of research in which ionic currents are conducted on the scale of nanometers;...
Graphene - from science fundamentals to low-cost production
Keynote presentations on the third day of Graphene Week 2015 offered an eclectic mix of fundamental science and practical chemical engineering. Here we report briefly on each of the talks, beginning with an introduction to optoelectronics in 2d semiconductors and heterostructures, and concluding with...
Changing the color of light
Researchers at the University of Delaware have received a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to explore a new idea that could improve solar cells, medical imaging and even cancer treatments. Simply put, they want to change the color of light. They won’t be tinkering with what you see out your window: no purple days or chartreuse nights,...
A 'nanomachine' for surgery with no incision
A surgical operation has long been considered one of the first options in cancer treatment; however, a number of issues have been recognized: a highly invasive procedure; a decline in the Quality of Life (QOL) after an operation; the possibility of a recurrence due to missed cancer cells; extended hospitalization,...
Plasmonics study suggests how to maximize production of 'hot electrons'
New research from Rice University could make it easier for engineers to harness the power of light-capturing nanomaterials to boost the efficiency and reduce the costs of photovoltaic solar cells. Although the domestic solar-energy industry grew by 34 percent in 2014, fundamental technical breakthroughs are needed if the U.S. is to meet its national...
Make mine a decaf: breakthrough in knowledge of how nanoparticles grow
A team of researchers from the University of Leicester and France’s G2ELab-CNRS in Grenoble have for the first time observed the growth of free nanoparticles in helium gas in a process similar to the decaffeination of coffee, providing new insights into the structure of nanoparticles. Nanoparticles have a very large surface area compared with their...
Artificial moth eyes enhance the performance of silicon solar cells
Mimicking the texture found on the highly antireflective surfaces of the compound eyes of moths, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory use block copolymer self assembly to produce precise and tunable nanotextured designs in the range of ~20 nm across macroscopic silicon solar cells ("Sub-50-nm Self-Assembled Nanotextures for Enhanced Broadband...
Researchers make scalable arrays of building blocks for ultrathin electronics
Semiconductors, metals and insulators must be integrated to make the transistors that are the electronic building blocks of your smartphone, computer and other microchip-enabled devices. Today's transistors are miniscule--a mere 10 nanometers wide--and formed from three-dimensional (3D) crystals. But a disruptive new technology looms that uses two-dimensional...
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