Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the United States and around the world. February is American Heart Month, and to honor healthy heart health awareness, Bioengineering Today, an editorially independent news service of AIP Publishing, is featuring stories on heart imaging this month.
Lens technologies have advanced across all scales, from digital cameras and high bandwidth in fiber optics to the LIGO lab instruments. Now, a new lens technology that could be produced using standard computer-chip technology is emerging and could replace the bulky layers and complex geometries of traditional curved lenses. Researchers at Harvard and Argonne National Laboratory have developed a device that integrates mid-infrared spectrum metalenses onto MEMS. They report their work in this week’s APL Photonics.
Organic polymer solar cells show potential to provide solar power to remote microwatt sensors, wearable technology and the Wi-Fi-connected appliances constituting the “internet of things.” While PSCs cannot match the durability or efficiency of inorganic solar cells, the potential to mass-produce nontoxic, disposable solar panels using roll-to-roll production makes them attractive for additional applications. In this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers review the latest advances and remaining challenges in PSC technology.
Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility used a “reduced physics” fluid model of plasma turbulence to explain unexpected properties of the density profile inside a tokamak experiment. Modeling plasma’s turbulent behavior could help scientists optimize the tokamak performance in future fusion reactors like ITER. They discuss their findings in this week’s Physics of Plasmas.
Spintronics leverages electron spins to enhance solid-state devices by prolonging battery life. Spintronic developments, however, are increasingly running up against the Slater-Pauling limit, the maximum for how tightly a material can pack its magnetization. Now, a new thin film is poised to break through this decades-old benchmark. Researchers discuss their work constructing a stable thin film made from iron, cobalt and manganese that may push past the Slater-Pauling limit, in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.
Quantum dots are rapidly taking center stage in emerging applications and research developments, but researchers are still studying how to precisely control the growth of these nanoscale particles and their underlying quantum behavior. For instance, defects form during production of semiconductor materials, so identical dots can differ in composition from one another. To learn more about these defects, a team has demonstrated imaging of an electronically excited quantum dot at multiple orientations.
Graphene is a remarkable material: light, strong, transparent and electrically conductive. It can also convert heat to electricity, and researchers have recently exploited this thermoelectric property to create a new kind of radiation detector. Classified as a bolometer, the new device has a fast response time and works over a wide range of temperatures. With a simple design and relatively low cost, this device could be scaled up, enabling a wide range of commercial applications.
Ice accumulation on aircraft wings is a common contributing factor to airplane accidents. Most existing models focus on either ice that freezes as a thin film on the airfoil, or immediately after it impacts the wing. Researchers have announced a new model, accounting for a combination of these forms, that they hope will melt our misunderstanding of ice accretion. They discuss their model in this week’s Physics of Fluids.
Pushing semiconductor technology to its full potential requires smaller designs at higher energy density, and transparent conductive oxides are a key emerging material, offering the unlikely combination of conductivity and transparency over the visual spectrum. One conductive oxide has unique properties that allow it to function well in power switching: gallium oxide, a material with an incredibly large bandgap. In this week’s Applied Physics Letters, researchers outline a case for producing microelectronics using gallium oxide.
Electrical and optical engineers in Australia have designed a novel platform that could tailor telecommunication and optical transmissions. They experimentally demonstrated their system using a new transmission wavelength with a higher bandwidth capacity than those currently used in wireless communication. Reported this week in APL Photonics, these experiments open up new horizons in communication and photonics technology.
The “internet of things,” which make everything from your toaster to your front door accessible online, has driven an explosion in data traffic and taken up huge amounts of bandwidth. However, a new range of frequencies in the terahertz region of the spectrum may soon be available for use. A paper in this week’s APL Photonics demonstrates the feasibility of using THz carrier waves for data transmission in diverse situations and environments.
The American Institute of Physics announced the hiring of a new CEO today. Experimental physicist Michael H. Moloney, coming from U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, will assume the role March 5, 2018. AIP is a nonprofit federation with 10 member societies that collectively represent more than 120,000 scientists, engineers, educators and students around the world. AIP offers programs, products and services for this community and seeks to advance, promote and serve the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity.
Recently, researchers have been exploring the potential for a new technology, called spintronics, that relies on detecting and controlling a particle's spin. This technology could lead to new types of more efficient and powerful devices. In a paper published in Applied Physics Letters, researchers measured how strongly a charge carrier's spin interacts with a magnetic field in diamond. This crucial property shows diamond as a promising material for spintronic devices.
Chiral nematic liquid crystals are an emerging class of lasing devices that are poised to shape how lasers are used in the future. New work on how to select band-edge modes in these devices, which determine the lasing energy, may shine light on how lasers of the future will be tuned, and researchers have demonstrated a technique that allows the laser to electrically switch emission between the long- and short-wavelength edges of the photonic bandgap. They report their work this week in Applied Physics Letters.
Researchers at Yale University have now grown a 2DEG system on gallium arsenide, a semiconductor that's efficient in absorbing and emitting light. This development is promising for new electronic devices that interact with light, such as new kinds of transistors, superconducting switches and gas sensors.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is accepting submissions for the 2018 AIP Science Communication Awards. The deadline for entries is March 30, 2018.
Recently, researchers have been studying diseases with a new approach: small, organ-on-a-chip devices that mimic the functions of human organs, serving as potentially cheaper and more effective tools. Now researchers have built a device that's especially good for modeling atherosclerosis. In this week’s APL Bioengineering, researchers illustrate how the new device can be used to study important inflammatory responses in cells that line the vessel in ways that could not be done in animal models.
So far, the search for catalysts even better than transition metals has been largely based on trial and error, and on the assumption that catalyzed reactions take place on step edges and other atomic defect sites of the metal crystals. An international research team has combined experiments using advanced infrared techniques with quantum theory to explore methane dissociation reactions in minute detail. They report their findings this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
As medicine and pharmacology investigate nanoscale processes, it has become increasingly important to identify and characterize different molecules. Raman spectroscopy, which leverages the scattering of laser light to identify molecules, has a limited capacity to detect molecules in diluted samples because of low signal yield, but researchers in India have improved molecular detection at low concentration levels by arranging silver nanoparticles on silicon nanowires. They describe their work in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.
The electrical grid in the contiguous United States is a behemoth of interconnected systems; if one section fails, millions could be without power. Remote villages in Alaska provide an example of how safeguards could build resilience into a larger electrical grid. These communities rely on microgrids -- small, local power stations that operate autonomously. Nine articles in the recent issue of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, provide the first reviews of energy technologies and costs for microgrids in Alaska.
A dark exciton can store information in its spin state, analogous to how a regular, classical bit stores information in its off or on state, but dark excitons do not emit light, making it hard to determine their spins and use them for quantum information processing. In new experiments, however, researchers can read the spin states of dark excitons, and do it more efficiently than before. Their demonstration, described in APL Photonics, can help researchers scale up dark exciton systems to build larger devices for quantum computing.
In today’s “internet of things,” devices connect primarily over short ranges at high speeds, an environment in which surface acoustic wave devices have shown promise for years. To obtain faster speeds, however, SAW devices need to operate at higher frequencies, limiting output power and overall performance. Researchers have demonstrated a new device that can achieve frequencies six times higher than most current devices. Their results are published this week in Applied Physics Letters.
When ionizing radiation passes through living tissue, it interacts with molecules present in the cells, stripping away electrons and producing charged species known as ions. Ionizing radiation used for cancer treatment includes gamma rays, X-rays and energetic particles. The electrons produced by this process, known as secondary electrons, can themselves go on to wreak further havoc, causing even more dramatic changes. This week in The Journal of Chemical Physics, investigators report studies of the impact of secondary electrons on a model of DNA.
Vector polarizers are a light filtering technology hidden behind the operation of many optical systems. They can be found, for instance, in sunglasses, LCD screens, microscopes, microprocessors, laser machining and more. Optical physicists published details of their new vector polarizer design this week in APL Photonics. The newly proposed design is a major advance in polarization technology because it enables flexible filtering of a wide range of light sources and generation of new light states.
Measuring dosage of radiation can be challenging, especially when working with low-energy protons, but researchers have now developed an ultra-thin diamond membrane that can measure the number of protons in a dose of radiation with almost perfect accuracy. The detector attaches to a charged-particle microbeam and enables the delivery of radiation to an area less than 2 micrometers wide. The study, published this week in Applied Physics Letters, represents a valuable technological advance for radiation biology.
Where do the molecules required for life originate? It may be that small organic molecules first appeared on earth and were later combined into larger molecules, such as proteins and carbohydrates. But a second possibility is that they originated in space, possibly within our solar system. A new study, published this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics, shows that a number of small organic molecules can form in a cold, spacelike environment full of radiation.
The fresh, unmistakable scent of a pine forest comes from a medley of chemicals produced by its trees. Researchers have now accurately determined the chemical structure of one of these compounds in its gas phase, a molecule called alpha-pinene. The new analysis can help scientists better detect and understand how alpha-pinene reacts with other gases in the atmosphere, a process which produces pollutants and particles called aerosols that affect health and climate. The researchers describe their analysis this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
Supercapacitors can store more energy than and are preferable to batteries because they are able to charge faster, mainly due to the vertical graphene nanosheets that are larger and positioned closer together. Using VGNs as the material for supercapacitor electrodes offers advantages due to their intriguing properties, and those advantages can be enhanced depending on how the material is grown, treated and prepared to work with electrolytes. In this week’s Journal of Applied Physics, researchers discuss their work to improve the material’s supercapacitance properties.
Proteins are huge molecules whose function depends on how they fold into intricate structures. To understand how these molecules work, researchers use computer modeling to calculate how proteins fold. Now, a new algorithm can accelerate those vital simulations, enabling them to model phenomena that were previously out of reach. The results can eventually help scientists better understand and treat diseases like Alzheimer's. The work is described this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics.
Earlier this year, amorphous diamond was synthesized for the first time using a technique involving high pressures, moderately high temperatures and a tiny amount of glassy carbon as starting material. A father-son team at Clemson University has now successfully calculated a number of basic physical properties for this new substance, including elastic constants and related quantities. The results are reported this week in Applied Physics Letters.
New developments may now propel nanoswimmers from science fiction to reality thanks to unexpected help from bacteria. An international research team has demonstrated a new technique for plating silica onto flagella, the helix-shaped tails found on many bacteria, to produce nanoscale swimming robots. As reported this week in APL Materials, the group’s biotemplated nanoswimmers spin their flagella thanks to rotating magnetic fields and can perform nearly as well as living bacteria.
Lead trihalide perovskite nanocrystals are promising candidates as light sources. Coupling quantum emitters with nanophotonic cavities can significantly boost efficiency, but this approach has not been explored with these nanocrystals. Now, researchers have demonstrated a simple approach for coupling solution-synthesized cesium lead tribromide perovskite nanocrystals to silicon nitride photonic cavities. The resulting room temperature light emission is enhanced by an order of magnitude above what perovskites can emit alone. They report their results this week in Applied Physics Letters.
Germanium was the material of choice in the early history of electronic devices, and due to its high charge carrier mobility, it’s making a comeback. It’s generally grown on expensive single-crystal substrates, adding another challenge to making it sustainably viable for most applications. To address this aspect, researchers demonstrate an epitaxy method that incorporates van der Waals’ forces to grow germanium on mica. They discuss their work in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Sometimes during catalytic hydrogenation, the partially hydrogenated products become volatile, melting and evaporating away before they can bind to more hydrogen atoms. Now, researchers have explored how and why this volatility varies during hydrogenation, suggesting that a previously underappreciated effect from carbon-hydrogen bonds in the molecule is the main culprit. The new analysis, published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, can help chemists identify the ideal conditions needed for catalytic hydrogenation so they can better remove excess hydrogen.
Is more always better? Researchers in Kyoto, Japan, sought to find out if that was the case for measuring magnetic field strengths. Their paper, appearing this week in AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, examines whether a double H-coil method or a single H-coil method is a more accurate way to measure magnetic field strength.
In motors, generators and similar electric machines, the electrical current that powers them generates magnetic fields that magnetize some of the metallic components. Choosing the right magnetic material is crucial for designing efficient machines, so researchers in Germany analyzed the existing system for characterizing soft magnetic materials, which are easily magnetized. To identify a better system for quality control, they looked at several factors that can affect the uncertainty inherent in the measurement of magnetic properties. Their results are in this week’s AIP Advances.
Soft magnetic core engineering plays a key role in high-efficiency electric motors, but for higher-frequency applications, soft magnetic composites are also promising. Each stage of motor construction affects the material’s microstructure, and understanding the details of the microstructure is paramount to reaching higher efficiency for electrical motors. In this week’s AIP Advances, researchers created an advanced characterization method to closely examine microscale structural characteristics and changes during manufacturing processes using electron backscatter diffraction.
Matter in the cores of old white dwarfs and the crusts of neutron stars is compressed to unimaginable densities by intense gravitational forces. The scientific community believes this matter is composed of Coulomb crystals that form at temperatures potentially as high as 100 million Kelvin. Researchers in Russia clarify the physics of these crystals this week in the journal Physics of Plasmas.
Electrical physicists from Czech Technical University have provided additional evidence that new current sensors introduce errors when assessing current through iron conductors. The researchers show how a difference in a conductor’s magnetic permeability, the degree of material’s magnetization response in a magnetic field, affects the precision of new sensors. They also provide recommendations for improving sensor accuracy. The results are published this week in AIP Advances.
There is a difference between male and female physics faculty salaries and the culture of physics is partly to blame, according to an article that is available for free this month from Physics Today. The article, "Salaries for female physics faculty trail those for male colleagues," identifies key factors influencing the gender pay gap and offers potential solutions that include changes in the culture in physics departments.
Eighty years after the theoretical prediction of the force required to overcome the van der Waals’ bonding between layers in a crystal, engineering researchers at Tohoku University have measured it directly. They report their results this week in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Rhythmic patterns and precise motions are key elements of proper swimming, and comparable demonstrations of this pattern repetition and power usage can be seen in a microscopic swimmer -- the amoeboid cell. The cell swimming shapes are now predictable to new levels of precision, thanks to advanced 3-D modeling. Researchers generated a 3-D model of an amoeba practicing pseudopod-driven swimming; they discuss their work in a cover article in this month’s Physics of Fluids.
When laser light is used to drive the motion of a thin, rigid membrane, the membrane vibrates in resonance with the light. The resulting patterns can be visualized through an array of quantum dots, where these tiny structures emit light at a frequency that responds to movement. The advance is reported this week in a cover article of Applied Physics Letters.
Diamond is largely recognized as the ideal material in wide bandgap development, but realizing its full potential in field-effect transistors has been challenging. Researchers incorporate a new approach by using the deep-depletion regime of bulk-boron-doped diamond MOSFETs. The new proof of concept enables the production of simple diamond MOSFET structures from single boron-doped epilayer stacks. This method increases the mobility by an order of magnitude. The results are published this week in Applied Physics Letters.
Thin-film piezoelectrics, with dimensions on the scale of micrometers or smaller, offer potential for new applications where smaller dimensions or a lower voltage operation are required. Researchers have demonstrated a new technique for making piezoelectric microelectromechanical systems by connecting a sample of lead zirconate titanate piezoelectric thin films to flexible polymer substrates. They report their results in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.
Advances in materials science have improved the composition of materials used in photocathode production that can operate at visible wavelengths and produce a beam with reduced transverse electron momentum spread. Despite these advances, the surface roughness of the photocathode continues to limit beam properties. A research team created computer models to bridge the gap between theoretical and experimental studies to provide a better picture of the physics at the surface of the photocathode. The results are published this week in the Journal of Applied Physics.
AIP and APS announced that Barry Simon of Caltech is the recipient of the 2018 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, which is awarded annually to honor significant contributions to the field. In recognizing Simon, the two organizations cited him “For his fundamental contributions to the mathematical physics of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and statistical mechanics, including spectral theory, phase transitions, and geometric phases, and his many books and monographs that have deeply influenced generations of researchers.”
The American Institute of Physics announced today the winners of its 2017 Science Communication Awards for Books, Articles, Writing for Children, and Broadcast and New Media: Timothy Jorgensen for Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation; Natalie Wolchover for “What No New Particles Means for Physics"; Antonia Banyard and Paula Ayer for Water Wow: An Infographic Exploration; and Noah Baker, Lorna Stewart, and Dog and Rabbit Animation Company for “Laureates in their own words-Physics.”
Researchers at the University of Michigan have brought a new method into the sound-dampening fold, demonstrating an origami lattice prototype that can potentially reduce acoustic noise on roadways. The technique allows researchers to selectively dampen noise at various frequencies by adjusting the distance between noise-diffusing elements. They report their work this week in the Journal of Applied Physics.
Physicists in France have proven theoretically that active sieving, as opposed to its passive counterpart, can improve the separation abilities of filtration systems. These new views on how active sieving could improve systems such as those used in water purification and dialysis were reported this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics. Active sieving also has the potential to filter molecules based on movement dynamics, opening up a whole new avenue in the field of membrane science based on the ability to tune osmotic pressure.
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