Phys.org January 14, 2022 In solid electrolytes the ionic conductivity is often markedly degraded by the fact that the ions get blocked at the crystallite grains boundaries. An international team of researchers (Spain, Germany, USA – MIT, Japan) has shown how light can be used to lower the barrier height that ions encounter at grain boundaries and enhance the flow of the ions by orders of magnitude by optimizing the system. They demonstrated the effect of light on the movement of oxygen ions through solid electrolyte composed of ceria and gadolinium. According to the researchers the process can be applied […]
Mini electricity generator made from quantum dots
Phys.org January 18, 2022 The major challenges toward the exploitation of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) in electronic applications include reliable contacting, and the preservation of their physical properties upon device integration. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, UK, Germany) described the quantum dot behavior of atomically precise GNRs integrated in a device geometry. The devices consist of a film of aligned five-atom-wide GNRs (5-AGNRs) transferred onto graphene electrodes with a sub 5 nm nanogap. They demonstrated that the narrow-bandgap 5-AGNRs exhibit metal-like behavior at room temperature and single-electron transistor behavior for temperatures below 150 K. They obtained addition energies in the […]
New p-type, near-infrared transparent conducting thin films with better performance
Phys.org January 19, 2022 The low conductivity of previous CuMO2 films obstructs the development of delafossite-based electronics. Researchers in China designed and fabricated a new p-type 4d transition metal Rh-based CuRhO2 film by a facile solution method. It has room-temperature conductivity as high as 735 S cm−1 which was achieved by substituting 10%Mg in Rh sites. The acceptor-doped CuRhO2 films exhibited high near-infrared transmittance of 85–60% with low room-temperature sheet resistance of 4.28–0.18 kΩ sq−1. The electronic structure, electrical transport mechanism, and intra-band excitation feature for the CuRhO2 film are unveiled. According to the researchers theoretical and experimental results contribute […]
The perfect trap: a new way to control the polarization of light
Phys.org January 19, 2022 An international team of researchers (Germany, UK, Scotland, Switzerland) has demonstrated that the Kerr effect in a high-finesse Fabry-Pérot resonator can be utilized to control the polarization of a continuous wave laser. They showed that a linearly polarized input field is converted into a left- or right-circularly-polarized field, controlled via the optical power. The observations are explained by Kerr-nonlinearity induced symmetry breaking, which splits the resonance frequencies of degenerate modes with opposite polarization handedness in an otherwise symmetric resonator. According to the researchers in the future one could arrange many of these devices onto a photonic […]
‘Rivers’ in the sky likely to drench East Asia under climate change
Phys.org January 18, 2022 Intense atmospheric rivers (ARs), eddy transports of moisture over the middle latitudes, contributed significantly to the extremely heavy rainfall events over the last decade in parts of East Asia. The extent to which ARs produce extreme rainfall over East Asia in a warmer climate remains unclear. An international team of researchers (Japan, USA – University of North Carolina) evaluated changes in the frequency and intensity of AR-related extreme heavy rainfall under global warming using a set of high-resolution global and regional atmospheric simulations. They found that both the AR-related water vapor transport and rainfall intensify over […]
Self-organization of complex structures: a matter of time
Nanowerk January 19, 2022 Self-organization is a central feature of biological systems. Researchers in Germany have developed an approach based on the concept of time complexity, which allows new strategies to be created for the more efficient synthesizing of complex structures. They showed that different control scenarios can informatively be characterized by their time complexity, i.e., their scaling of the assembly time with the structure size, analogous to algorithms for computational problems. Especially for large structures, differences in the time complexity of the scenarios lead to strongly diverging time efficiencies. Most significantly, they showed that by effectively regulating the supply […]
Superabsorption unlocks key to next-generation quantum batteries
Phys.org January 17, 2022 It is theoretically possible that the charging power of quantum batteries increases faster than the size of the battery which could allow new ways to speed charging. An international team of researchers (Australia, UK, Italy) built several wafer-like microcavities of different sizes containing organic semiconductor materials that store energy. They contained different numbers of organic molecules. Each was charged using a laser. Underlying the superabsorbing effect of the quantum batteries is the idea that all the molecules act collectively through quantum superposition. As the microcavity size increased and the number of molecules increased, the charging time […]
Unexpected energy storage capability where water meets metal surfaces
Science Daily January 19, 2022 Strong interaction of metal with water molecules leads to water chemisorption and accumulation of ions in the Helmholtz layer beyond expectation, resulting in a higher interface charge storage ability. An international team of researchers (Germany, Israel, France) extracted new physico-chemical information on the capacitance and structure of the electrical double-layer of platinum and gold nanoparticles at the molecular level, employing single nanoparticle electrochemistry. The charge storage ability of the solid/liquid interface is larger by one order-of-magnitude than predicted by the traditional mean-field models of the double-layer. Using molecular dynamics simulations, they investigated the possible relationship […]
A well-known iron-based magnet is also a potential quantum information material
Phys.org January 13, 2022 For quantum information processing the strongest-performing permanent magnets contain expensive rare-earth metals magnets. Researchers at the Iowa State University scanned vast number of iron-based permanent magnets and established that lanthanum-based hexaferrites show an advantage over conventional samarium-based hexaferrites. They identified LaFe12O19 as an excellent candidate for a gap magnet (iron-based permanent magnet). It is an excellent wide-bandgap semiconductor, can withstand higher voltages, frequencies, and temperatures. They discovered a new quantum state in this material, which strongly locks the magnetization along a fixed direction in the crystal, it could host other rare earths possessing nontrivial localized electronic […]
When graphene speaks, scientists can now listen
Phys.org January 19, 2022 Laser-induced graphene (LIG) can be patterned on a variety of substrates using a laser scriber/cutter. The quality and morphology of LIG is currently analyzed using Raman spectroscopy and electron microscopy. Researchers at Rice University have developed a new method to analyze LIG in real-time during the synthesis using a microphone attached to the laser writing head, followed by a simple acoustic signal processing scheme. They demonstrated that it is possible to use the same energy input to simultaneously drive the conversion process and probe the formation of LIG in situ by applying Fourier and integral analyses, […]