Nanowerk December 18, 2024 The storage medium must be modifiable on the nanoscale. While polymers are promising storage media, they face challenges with synthesis, erasing temperatures, and stability. Researchers in Australia developed a low-cost and robust polymer system that allows repeated writing, reading and erasing. It provided a network of S─S bonds that could be broken and re-formed repeatedly. They leveraged this property to encode information, and thermal S─S metathesis and polymer re-flow to erase. This control enabled data encoding not just as a function of the presence or absence of an indent, but also indentation depth. It increased the […]
Tag Archives: Advanced materials
Scientists develop material with almost perfect water repellency
Phys.org December 12, 2024 While the accessible pores render an enormous variety of functionalities to the bulk of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), the outer surfaces exposed by these crystalline materials also offer unique characteristics not available when using conventional substrates. An international team of researchers (Germany, India) fabricated superhydrophobic substrates with static water contact angles over 160° by grafting hydrocarbon chains to well-defined MOF thin films (SURMOFs) prepared using layer-by-layer methods. A detailed theoretical modelling of the hydrocarbon chains grafted on the outer SURMOF surface with well-defined spacing between anchoring points revealed that the grafted hydrocarbon chains behaved similarly to polymer […]
MIT physicists predict exotic form of matter with potential for quantum computing
MIT News November 18, 2024 Based on the recent discovery of fractional quantum anomalous Hall states in moiré systems, researchers at MIT studied a family of moiré systems, skyrmion Chern band models, which could be realized in two-dimensional semiconductor-magnet heterostructures and capture the essence of twisted transition metal dichalcogenide homobilayers. Using many-body exact diagonalization they showed that, despite strong Berry curvature variations in momentum space, the non-Abelian Moore-Read state could be realized at half filling of the second miniband. According to the researchers, their results demonstrate the feasibility of non-Abelian fractionalization in moiré systems without Landau levels and shed light […]
Amorphous nanosheets created using hard-to-synthesize metal oxides and oxyhydroxides
Phys.org October 21, 2024 Amorphous 2D nanosheets have unique properties that are distinct from crystalline 2D nanosheets. However, compared with the vast library of crystalline 2D nanosheets, amorphous 2D nanosheets lack an efficient synthetic approach. Researchers in Japan developed a strategy that yields a library of 10 distinct amorphous 2D metal oxides/oxyhydroxides using solid-state surfactant crystals. A key feature of this process was a stepwise reaction using solid surfactant. The solid-state surfactant crystals have metal ions arranged in the interlayer space, and hydrolysis of the metal ions leads to the formation of isolated clusters in the surfactant crystals via limited […]
New light-induced material shows powerful potential for quantum applications
Phys.org October 15, 2024 By using semiconducting hybrid perovskite as an exploratory platform, a team of researchers in the US (Northern Illinois University, Argonne National Laboratory) discovered that Nd2+ doped CH3NH3PbI3 (MAPbI3) perovskite exhibited a Kondo-like exciton-spin interaction under cryogenic and photoexcitation conditions. From a mechanistic standpoint, such extended charge separation states are the consequence of the trap state enabled by the antiferromagnetic exchange interaction between the light-induced exciton and the localized 4 f spins of the Nd2+ in the proximity. Importantly, this Kondo-like exciton-spin interaction can be modulated leading to exciton recombination at the dynamics comparable to pristine MAPbI3… read […]
Modeling system could enable future generations of self-sensing materials
Phys.org October 7, 2024 An international team of researchers (UK, Turkey) developed an experimentally informed predictive framework for autonomous sensing architected materials, combining theoretical and computational methodologies. The model incorporates stress-dependent electrical resistivity, geometric, and contact nonlinearities. It captures architecture-dependent piezoresistive responses of lattice composites produced via additive manufacturing of polyetherimide (PEI)/carbon nanotube (CNT) nanoengineered feedstock. The PEI/CNT composite exhibited exceptional strength, stiffness, and strain sensitivity, translating into remarkable piezoresistive characteristics for the PEI/CNT lattice composites, surpassing existing works. It accurately predicts both macroscopic piezoresistive responses and the influence of architectural and topological variations on electric current paths. According to […]
New materials and techniques show promise for microelectronics and quantum technologies
Phys.org October 2, 2024 Low dimensional (LD) organic metal halide hybrids (OMHHs) have recently emerged as new generation functional materials with exceptional structural and property tunability. Despite the remarkable advances in the development of LD OMHHs, optical properties have been the major functionality extensively investigated for most of LD OMHHs developed to date, while other properties such as magnetic and electronic properties, remain significantly under-explored. An international team of researchers (USA – Florida State University, North Carolina State University, UCLA, Israel) describe the characterization of the magnetic and electronic properties of a 1D OMHH, organic-copper (II) chloride hybrid (C8H22N2)Cu2Cl6. Due […]
First liquid-liquid extraction trial finds porous liquids can separate harmful or unwanted alcohols from mixtures
Phys.org September 18, 2024 Researchers in the UK explored the application of porous liquids for the separation of miscible liquids, using MEG/water (MEG=monoethylene glycol) and EtOH/water as proof-of-principle. PLs ZIF-8@PDMS (PL1, PDMS=polydimethylsilicone) or ZIF-8@sesame oil (PL2) each consisting of 25 wt % of the hydrophobic microporous material ZIF-8 was dispersed in PDMS or sesame oil respectively were physically stable to sedimentation. MEG was selectively extracted through a membrane from approximately into the PL phase. The PL could also be regenerated and re-used, suggesting its potential for continuous, cyclic extraction, PL3 (silicalite-1@PDMS) was effective in selective alcohol extraction from beverages. According to […]
New material with wavy layers of atoms exhibits unusual superconducting properties
Phys.org September 19, 2024 Bulk van der Waals (vdW) superlattices hosting 2D interfaces between minimally disordered layers represent scalable bulk analogues of artificial vdW heterostructures and present a complementary venue to explore incommensurately modulated 2D states. An international team of researchers in the (USA- MIT, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Harvard, Japan) reported the bulk vdW superlattice SrTa2S5 realizing an incommensurate one-dimensional (1D) structural modulation of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) H-TaS2 layers. High-quality electronic transport in the H-TaS2 layers was made anisotropic by the modulation and exhibited commensurability oscillations paralleling lithographically modulated 2D systems. They found unconventional, clean-limit superconductivity […]
Molecular simulations and supercomputing shed light on energy-saving biomaterials
Phys.org September 6, 2024 Nanocellulose from biomass is promising for manufacturing sustainable composite biomaterials and bioplastics. However, obtaining nanocellulose at pilot scale requires energy-intensive fibrillation to shear cellulose fibers apart into nano-dimensional forms in water. To reduce the energy consumption in fibrillation a team of researchers in the US (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Maine) found that aqueous NaOH:urea (0.007:0.012 wt.%) reduced the fibrillation energy by ~21% on average relative to water alone. The NaOH and urea acted synergistically on CNFs to aid fibrillation but at different length scales. According to the researchers their work suggested a general mechanism […]