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In environmental technology, self-cleaning surfaces could reduce maintenance costs and improve performance in sectors such as solar panels and water-repellent coatings. In the biomedical field, liquid-repellent materials could help develop medical devices that resist bacterial build-up, improving hygiene and patient safety.
The team, led by Assistant Professor Guangxin Ni, along with Assistant Professor Cyprian Lewandowski and graduate research assistant Ty Wilson, found that the conductivity of twisted bilayer graphene is not heavily impacted by physical or chemical manipulations and instead depends more on how the material’s minute geometry structure changes by interlayer twisting — a revelation that opens the door for additional studies on how lower temperatures and frequencies impact graphene’s properties.
Photonic time crystals represent a unique class of optical materials. Unlike traditional crystals, which have spatially repeating structures, photonic time crystals remain uniform in space but exhibit a periodic oscillation in time. This distinctive quality creates “momentum band gaps,” or unusual states where light pauses inside the crystal while its intensity grows exponentially over time. To grasp the peculiarity of light’s interaction within a photonic time crystal, imagine light traversing a medium that switches between air and water quadrillions of times per second –– a remarkable phenomenon that challenges our conventional understanding of optics. One potential application for the photonic time crystals is in nanosensing.
In a recently published paper in the journal Small, the Binghamton team outlined their paper-based wearable device that would provide sustained high-efficiency power output through moisture capture.
When you place metal nanoparticles on carbon, they become much more active. What was previously only assumed based on experience could now be explained in detail for the first time at TU Wien (Vienna).
Deciphering nuclear shapes has relevance to a wide range of physics questions, including which atoms are most likely to split in nuclear fission, how heavy atomic elements form in collisions of neutron stars, and which nuclei could point the way to exotic particle decay discoveries. Leveraging improved knowledge of nuclear shapes will also deepen scientists’ understanding of the initial conditions of a particle soup that mimics the early universe, which is created in RHIC’s energetic particle smashups. The method can be applied to analyzing additional data from RHIC as well as data collected from nuclear collisions at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It will also have relevance to future explorations of nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider, a nuclear physics facility in the design stage at Brookhaven Lab.
Supersolids are a new form of quantum matter that has only recently been demonstrated. The state of matter can be produced artificially in ultracold, dipolar quantum gases. A team led by Innsbruck physicist Francesca Ferlaino has now demonstrated a missing hallmark of superfluidity, namely the existence of quantized vortices as system’s response to rotation. They have observed tiny quantum vortices in the supersolid, which also behave differently than previously assumed.
Electrons typically travel at high speeds, zipping through matter unbound. In the 1930s, physicist Eugene Wigner predicted that electrons could be coaxed into stillness at low densities and cold temperatures, forming an electron ice that would later be called the Wigner crystal. Ninety years later, in 2021, a team led by Feng Wang and Michael Crommie, Berkeley Lab senior faculty scientists in the Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley physics professors, provided direct evidence that these electron crystals exist. Now Wang, Crommie, and their teams have captured direct images of a new quantum phase of an electron solid – the Wigner molecular crystal. Their findings were reported in the journal Science.
The research team sought to find better methods for making hydrogenated quantum diamond with the NV centers intact. “We’re writing a recipe book and characterizing different ways of properly hydrogenating diamond surfaces so that we understand how to do this better for a number of applications,” said Daniel McCloskey, the first author of the paper and a researcher at the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne.
Using muon spin rotation at the Swiss Muon Source SmS, researchers at PSI have discovered that a quantum phenomenon known as time-reversal symmetry breaking occurs at the surface of the Kagome superconductor RbV₃Sb₅ at temperatures as high as 175 K. This sets a new record for the temperature at which time-reversal symmetry breaking is observed among Kagome systems.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and at the University of Magdeburg in Germany have developed a novel type of nanomechanical resonator that combines two important features: high mechanical quality and piezoelectricity. This development could open doors to new possibilities in quantum sensing technologies.
Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Ruhr University Bochum and other international collaborators have provided the first demonstration of how iron atoms, when introduced into titanium, undergo a GB transition. During their study, the researchers observed that the iron atoms segregate (concentrate) to form quasicrystalline-like structures (those with patterns that are ordered but not periodic) at the interface. This work is described in a recent issue of Science.
Researchers at Empa's nanotech@surfaces laboratory have developed a method that allows many spins to “talk” to each other in a controlled manner – and that also enables the researchers to “listen” to them, i.e. to understand their interactions. Together with scientists from the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory and the Technical University of Dresden, they were able to precisely create an archetypal chain of electron spins and measure its properties in detail. Their results have now been published in the renowned journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Successful development of a perfect diamagnetic conducting polymer. The discovery of perfect diamagnetism in polyaniline represents a unique phenomenon not observed in conventional organic or inorganic conductive materials. It is plausible that an unconventional mechanism of perfect diamagnetism is at play, potentially leading to novel advancements in the field of conductive polymers.
Off the Rack, On the Grid: MXene Nanomaterials Enable Wireless Charging in Textiles: The next step for fully integrated textile-based electronics to make their way from the lab to the wardrobe is figuring out how to power the garment gizmos without unfashionably toting around a solid battery. Researchers from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Accenture Labs in California have taken a new approach to the challenge by building a full textile energy grid that can be wirelessly charged. In their recent study, the team reported that it can power textile devices, including a warming element and environmental sensors that transmit data in real-time.
“Wearable” devices for cells: These battery-free, subcellular-sized devices, made of a soft polymer, are designed to gently wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging the cells, upon wireless actuation with light. By snugly wrapping neuronal processes, they could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity at a subcellular level.
How small is “small?” Spider silk nanofibrils are just a few molecular layers thick, equivalent to approximately one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. Invisible to the naked eye, these microscopic fibers possess extraordinary strength, five times that of steel, and remarkable extensibility. This unique combination allows spider silk to absorb vast amounts of energy, making it a highly coveted material for potential applications. To study these remarkable fibers, scientists exfoliated nanofibrils from the silk onto a thumb tip-sized silicon disk containing approximately two million holes, each 200 nanometers in diameter, and measured their strength and stretchability.
