Nano News: 07/29/15

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...