High-brightness femtosecond laser sources with large spectral coverage are indispensable tools that enable optical spectroscopy to simultaneously resolve the ultrafast dynamics of multiple physical, chemical, and biological processes of a sample.
The Empa spin-off BTRY wants to revolutionize rechargeable batteries: Their thin-film batteries are not only safer and longer-lasting than conventional lithium-ion batteries, they are also much more environmentally friendly to manufacture and can be charged and discharged in just one minute. For now, the battery is very small, but the founders have big plans for it.
To improve battery performance and production, Penn State researchers and collaborators have developed a new fabrication approach that could make for more efficient batteries that maintain energy and power levels.
A professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York has received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop electronic devices made entirely of paper.
A research team led by Dr. Jung-dae Kwon from the Department of Energy & Electronic Materials at the Korea Institute of Materials Science(KIMS) has succeeded in realizing the world's first transparent thin-film solar cell on a flexible substrate that exhibits different reflective colours and does not significantly reduce solar cell's efficiency.
High-impact research projects that will use quantum approaches to address climate resilience and sustainable energy; scale up educational programs for at-risk children in Nebraska and support the early childhood workforce; and make food plastics safer for consumers have been funded through the second Grand Challenges Catalyst Competition.
A team at Sandia National Laboratories developed a molecule that helps change the way some materials react to temperature fluctuations, which makes them more durable. It’s an application that could be used in everything from plastic phone cases to missiles.
Armando Rúa, a collaborator with the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, was awarded a prestigious grant as part of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Experimental Investigators Initiative for his innovative materials science proposal.
Alexander Brand, assistant professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has received a $600,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.
Empa researchers have developed an epoxy resin that can be repaired and recycled, in addition to being flame-retardant and mechanically strong. Potential applications range from coating for wooden flooring to composites in aerospace and railways.
In a new Q&A, microelectronics expert and CHiPPS Director Ricardo Ruiz shares his perspective on keeping pace with Moore’s Law in the decades to come through a revolutionary technique called extreme ultraviolet lithography.
Creating novel materials by combining layers with unique, beneficial properties seems like a fairly intuitive process—stack up the materials and stack up the benefits.
For nearly 40 years, materials called ‘strange metals’ have flummoxed quantum physicists, defying explanation by operating outside the normal rules of electricity.
Angel Garcia-Esparza wins 2023 Spicer Young Investigator Award for studying catalysts in action. The award is part of SLAC SSRL's annual users' meeting in September.
The Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at Berkeley Lab celebrated the first five years of operations and its renewal with a two-day hybrid summit in May 2023, bringing together staff, alums, testbed users, and colleagues.
For over 150 years, Missouri University of Science and Technology has been a leader in the field of mineral recovery, and that continued to be the case last week when the university hosted the third annual Resilient Supply of Critical Minerals national workshop.
Argonne National Laboratory is reimagining the lab spaces and scientific careers of the future by harnessing the power of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in the quest for new knowledge.
In a ground-breaking first, researchers have obtained the stress and energy criterion and corresponding analytical solution of rockburst occurrence and succeed to assess rock burst risk and guide to prevent the geohazard.
Research is underway around the world to find alternatives to our current electronic computing technology, as great, electron-based systems have limitations. A new way of transmitting information is emerging from the field of magnonics: instead of electron exchange, the waves generated in magnetic media could be used for transmission, but magnonics-based computing has been (too) slow to date. Scientists at the University of Vienna have now discovered a significant new method: When the intensity is increased, the spin waves become shorter and faster – another step towards magnon computing. The results were published in the renowned journal Science Advances.
Rice University chemists have discovered that tiny gold “seed” particles, a key ingredient in one of the most common nanoparticle recipes, are one and the same as gold buckyballs, 32-atom spherical molecules that are cousins of the carbon buckyballs discovered at Rice in 1985.
Due to the poor chemical stability of the perovskite materials in the polar solvent, the most commonly used photolithography and etching techniques for patterning the single crystal arrays are highly incompatible with perovskite materials. To solve this problem, scientists in China invented a one-step space confinement and antisolvent-assisted crystallization (SC-ASC) method that enables the controlled fabrication of high-quality single crystal arrays on various substrates.
Argonne recently hosted an Energy Efficiency Scaling for Two Decades Workshop. This is the latest in a series of workshops led by the Department of Energy to develop a roadmap to double the energy efficiency of semiconductors every two years.
A team of scientists from Ames National Laboratory and Texas A&M University developed a new quantum-mechanics-based approach to predict metal ductility. The team demonstrated its effectiveness on refractory multi-principal-element alloys.
The Intelligent Wave Engineering Team of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) and the Electro Ceramics Laboratory of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Korea University (KU) have collaborated to develop a cutting-edge ultrasound sensor that ensures the safety of large structures, especially water supply pipelines. It is expected to enhance the competitiveness of non-destructive testing companies, reflecting the trend of pursuing eco-friendly and unmanned monitoring.
Think you know everything about a material? Try giving it a twist—literally. That’s the main idea of an emerging field in condensed matter physics called “twistronics,” which has researchers drastically changing the properties of 2D materials, like graphene, with subtle changes—as small as going from a 1.1° to 1.2°—in the angle between stacked layers.
Systems in the Universe trend toward disorder, with only applied energy keeping the chaos at bay. The concept is called entropy, and examples can be found everywhere: ice melting, campfire burning, water boiling. Zentropy theory, however, adds another level to the mix.
A team led by Virginia Tech researchers has developed a new method for upcycling plastics into high-value chemicals known as surfactants, which are used to create soap, detergent, and more.
The next generation of 2D semiconductor materials doesn’t like what it sees when it looks in the mirror. Penn State researchers may have solved this issue.
Micro-nano fibres with wavelength-scale diameters and tapered geometries are excellent platforms for studying light-matter interactions. A novel fibre-tapering technique is reported, compactly combining plasmonic micro-heaters and deformed optical fibres. The system enabled a transfer to a scanning electron microscope for in-situ monitoring of the tapering process. The dynamics of “heat and pull” was directly visualized with nanometre precision in real-time, exemplifying in-situ observations of micro and nanoscale light-matter interactions.
Measuring and assessing fluid viscosity is critical in a variety of industries. Successfully developing rapid, low-cost, miniaturized viscometers covering a wide measurement range has been extremely limited. The novel design of a viscometer integrates a chip-scale GaN optical device with a bendable strip. This work also demonstrates the remarkable features of fast measurement, high stability, and real-time monitoring capability, which prove its potential as a new generation of viscosity-measuring units in various practical applications.
New research from Q-MEEN-C shows that electrical stimuli passed between neighboring electrodes can also affect non-neighboring electrodes. Known as non-locality, this discovery is a crucial milestone toward creating brain-like computers with minimal energy requirements.
Researchers have successfully grown bacterial cells in potential sand-based construction materials, as detailed in a paper published by Research Directions: Biotechnology Design, a new journal from Cambridge University Press.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $37 million in funding for 52 projects to 44 institutions which include Argonne projects. The funding will help build research capacity, infrastructure and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $37 million in funding for 52 projects to 44 institutions to build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented in DOE’s Office of Science portfolio, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs).
The U.S. Department of Energy has renewed the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials. Its mission is to apply theoretical methods and software to the understanding, simulation and prediction of material properties at the atomic scale.
Technion researchers have developed a coherent and controllable spin-optical laser based on a single atomic layer. It paves the way to study coherent spin-dependent phenomena in both classical and quantum regimes, opening new horizons in fundamental research and optoelectronic devices exploiting both electron and photon spins.
Cornell researchers used magnetic imaging to obtain the first direct visualization of how electrons flow in a special type of insulator, and by doing so they discovered that the transport current moves through the interior of the material, rather than at the edges, as scientists had long assumed.
Dean Pierce of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a research team led by ORNL’s Alex Plotkowski were honored by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office for development of novel high-performance alloys that can withstand extreme environments.
A team at Sandia National Laboratories has developed a faster and more comprehensive way of testing personal protective equipment, or PPE. The basic principle: modeling a device to fit the human form and human behavior.
A team of researchers report a mechanical response across a layered magnetic material tied to changing its electron spin. This response could have important applications in nanodevices requiring ultra-precise and fast motion control.
Silicon-based materials are currently the undisputed leaders in the field of semiconductors. Even so, scientists around the world are actively trying to find superior alternatives for next-generation electronics and high-power systems.
Time is precious to everyone. Digital twin under development at Argonne will allow scientists to conduct virtual experiments that will later maximize use of time in real experiments at large user facilities.
You know that freeze-ray gun that “Batman” villain Mr. Freeze uses to “ice” his enemies? A University of Virginia professor thinks he may have figured out how to make one in real life.