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Category: materials

Scientists have managed to draw at high resolution and speed, local patterns in organic semiconductor films used in optoelectronic and photonic applications. The new method enables the patterning of material characteristics and concomitant final properties, including molecular conformation, orientation, crystallinity and composition. The technique, published with open access in Nature Communications, has also been patented and industrial partners are sought for further co-development.

Bridging the gap between and the worldwide deployed silicon electronics requires new low cost and low energy consumption fabrication methods and technologies. This work represents a key enabling technology to accelerate the use of flexible and light-weight organic electronics and photonics to the level of silicon-based devices.

The microstructure and composition of organic semiconductors need to be tuned locally in order to optimize their properties, such as charge carrier mobility, electrical conductivity and light emission; and expand their functionalities for the practical upscaling of applications such as organic transistors (OFETs) and light emitting diodes (OLEDs), organic photovoltaics (OPV), organic thermoelectric generators (OTEGs), and organic photonic structures.

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Omg levitating cars o,.o!

In this vehicle, the diamagnetic fields principles are applied to obtain a hovering and propulsion effect which makes low cost, friction free and zero pollutant emissions transport media. This is done using a special combination of electromagnetic and the natural diamagnetic susceptibility in all The physical effect of this is an air gap between the surface and the vehicle. The height of levitation has a direct relationship with the material used as floor surface; since all materials have diamagnetic susceptibility factors. Also, the power on the diamagnetic field is a key for the levitation and propulsion effect. All these factors make this prototype vehicle an easy maneuverable one, since there are almost no inertial forces in the system.

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A team from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new kind of battery that mixes the best of both worlds of liquid- and solid-state batteries. The design is the first all-liquid metal battery that can work at room temperature and is claimed to outperform lithium-ion batteries.

Liquid metal batteries are less susceptible to wearing out than solid batteries because dendrites don’t form and damage the components. The only downside is, most of these batteries need to be heated to at least 240°C (464°F) to keep the metals liquid and the equipment required to do that is bulky and energy-consuming.

For the study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, the UT team examined alloys that could remain liquid at useful temperatures. They decided to use a gallium-indium alloy for the cathode and a sodium-potassium alloy for the anode, which was able to stay liquid at 20°C (68°F). The researchers say it’s the lowest operating temperature ever recorded for a liquid-metal battery.

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Black holes don’t glow — in fact, they’re famous for doing the opposite. But if they’re actively devouring material from the space around them, that material can blaze like a billion X-ray Suns.

And for the first time, astronomers have now seen that blaze mysteriously snuffed out, before gradually returning to brightness.

The supermassive black hole is a beast clocking in at 19 million solar masses, powering a galactic nucleus 275 million light-years away, in a galaxy called 1ES 1927+654.

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Berkeley Lab researchers are part of an international team that reports a high-sensitivity measurement by underground CUPID-Mo experiment.

Nuclear physicists affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) played a leading role in analyzing data for a demonstration experiment that has achieved record precision for a specialized detector material.

The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments that are using a variety of approaches to detect a theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, that could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and of their role in the formation of the universe.

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Nuclear physicists affiliated with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) played a leading role in analyzing data for a demonstration experiment that has achieved record precision for a specialized detector material.

The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments that are using a variety of approaches to detect a theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, that could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and of their role in the formation of the universe.

The preliminary results from the CUPID-Mo experiment, based on the Berkeley Lab-led analysis of data collected from March 2019 to April 2020, set a new world-leading limit for the neutrinoless double-beta decay process in an isotope of molybdenum known as Mo-100. Isotopes are forms of an element that carry a different number of uncharged particles called neutrons in their atomic nuclei.

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Researchers at ETH have measured the timing of single writing events in a novel magnetic memory device with a resolution of less than 100 picoseconds. Their results are relevant for the next generation of main memories based on magnetism.

At the Department for Materials of the ETH in Zurich, Pietro Gambardella and his collaborators investigate tomorrow’s memory devices. They should be fast, retain data reliably for a long time and also be cheap. So-called magnetic “random access memories” (MRAM) achieve this quadrature of the circle by combining fast switching via electric currents with durable data storage in magnetic materials. A few years ago researchers could already show that a certain physical effect – the spin-orbit torque – makes particularly fast data storage possible. Now Gambardella’s group, together with the R&D-center IMEC in Belgium, managed to temporally resolve the exact dynamics of a single such storage event – and to use a few tricks to make it even faster.

Magnetizing with single spins.

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If you stack two layers of graphene one on top of the other, and rotate them at an angle of 1.1º (no more and no less) from each other—the so-called ‘magic-angle,’ experiments have proven that the material can behave like an insulator, where no electrical current can flow, and at the same can also behave like a superconductor, where electrical currents can flow without resistance.

This major finding took place in 2018. Last year, in 2019, while ICFO researchers were improving the quality of the device used to replicate such breakthroughs, they stumbled upon something even bigger and totally unexpected. They were able to observe a zoo of previously unobserved superconducting and correlated states, in addition to an entirely new set of magnetic and topological states, opening a completely new realm of richer physics.

So far, there is no theory that has been able to explain superconductivity in magic angle graphene at the microscopic level. However, this finding has triggered many studies, which are trying to understand and unveil the physics behind all these phenomena that occur in this material. In particular, scientists drew analogies to unconventional high temperature superconductors—the cuprates, which hold the record highest superconducting temperatures, only 2 times lower than . Their microscopic mechanism of the superconducting phase is still not understood, 30 years after its discovery. However, similarly to magic angle twisted bi-layer graphene (MATBG), it is believed that an insulating phase is responsible for the superconducting phase in proximity to it. Understanding the relationship between the superconducting and insulating phases is at the center of researcher’s interest, and could lead to a big breakthrough in superconductivity research.

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