MIT News October 5, 2022 Researchers at MIT used computational thermodynamics, phase transformation physics, crystallographic calculations, and machine learning to solve the problem of creating a material that can actuate without accumulating damage, thus making it possible for it to function reliably as a shape-memory material through many cycles of use resulting in a new variation of zirconia. They introduced some atoms of different elements into its structure in a way that altered some of its properties. The elements dissolved into the lattice, and they sculpt it, and changed that transformation, made it more gentle at the atomic scale. The […]
Tag Archives: Materials science
Researchers develop ultra-strong aerogels with materials used in bullet-proof vests
Science Daily October 3, 2022 Researchers in Hong Kong have developed new type of polymer aerogel material involving self-assembled 3D networks of aramid nanofiber composites with high nodal connectivity and strong crosslinking between fibrils. Theoretical simulations of 3D networks revealed that these features at fibrillar joints may lead to an enhancement of macroscopic mechanical properties by orders of magnitude even with a constant level of solid content. They verified that polymeric aerogels achieved both high specific tensile modulus and fracture energy which are advantageous for diverse structural applications. According to the researchers the fabrication process is simple, the material can […]
The building blocks for exploring new exotic states of matter
Nanowerk September 17, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – UCLA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Colorado, Northeastern University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Harvard University, Taiwan, India) developed an intrinsic ferromagnetic topological insulator with three nonmagnetic layers of Bi2Te3 between layers of MnBi2Te4, which when combined, created MnBi8Te13. This material design increases the distance between the MnBi2Te4 layers, which successfully eliminated the antiferromagnetic effect, leading to long-range ferromagnetism below 10.5 K with strong coupling between magnetism and charge carriers. They used a combination of synthesis, characterization tools, and theory to confirm the structure and properties of new magnetic […]
Researchers propose new technology for aviation materials to allow for adjusting their properties
Phys.org September 19, 2022 Most of the carbon fiber composites used currently are based on epoxy resin and other non-melting, insoluble materials that are not recyclable. Researchers in Russia have created a new composite material based on engineering thermoplastic polymers and carbon fiber. For matrix they used polyethersulfone powder which has excellent mechanical properties and resistant to high temperatures, steam, and various chemicals. Unlike epoxy it is recyclable. They determined the optimal content of carbon fibers for airborne composites based on polyethersulfone to be 60–70% of the total weight of the structure. The properties of the material can be adjusted […]
Breaking an optical rule: Engineers find a way to manipulate light at the nanoscale
Phys.org September 12, 2022 According to Moss rule the absorption edge and the sub-bandgap refractive index of a semiconductor exhibit a rigid trade-off setting an upper limit on the refractive index of a dielectric for a given operating wavelength. According to a team of researchers in the US (Rice University, Johns Hopkins University) there are many dielectric materials that surpass the Moss rule, referred to as super-Mossian dielectrics. They discussed the general features of super-Mossian dielectrics and their physical origin to facilitate the search for high index dielectrics. They developed iron pyrite with index nearly 40% higher than the Moss […]
New practical method of producing Airy beams could enhance ultrasound
Phys.org September 7, 2022 Airy beams are a class of acoustic waves that move on a curved, arch-like trajectory and can auto-focus around obstacles that are directly in the beam’s path, which makes them well suited for ultrasound applications in biomedical imaging, therapy, non-destructive testing, and particle manipulation. A team of researchers in the US (Washington State University, Pennsylvania State University) has designed and fabricated a family of Airy-beam-enabled binary acoustic metasurfaces (AB BAMs) to generate Airy beams for underwater ultrasound-beam manipulation. They used 3D printing with two coding bits: a polylactic acid unit acting as a bit “1” and […]
Antiferromagnetic hybrids achieve important functionality for spintronic applications
Phys.org August 23, 2033 Previous studies have shown spin injection and detection in antiferromagnet/nonmagnetic metal bilayers; however, spin injection in these systems has been found effective only at cryogenic temperatures. An international team of researchers (USA – UC Riverside, University of Utah, Germany) has demonstrated sizable interfacial spin transport in a hybrid antiferromagnet/ferromagnet system, consisting of Cr2O3 and permalloy, which remains robust up to the room temperature. They examined their experimental data within a spin diffusion model and found evidence for the important role of interfacial magnon pumping in the signal generation. The results bridge spin-orbitronic phenomena of ferromagnetic metals […]
Researchers discover a material that can learn like the brain
Nanowerk August 22, 2022 MOS junctions can provide a variety of functionalities, from memory to computing. The technology, however, faces constraints in terms of further miniaturization and compatibility with post–von Neumann computing architectures. Manipulation of structural—rather than electronic—states could provide a path to ultrascaled low-power functional devices, but the electrical control of such states is challenging. An international team of researchers (Switzerland, South Korea) report electronically accessible long-lived structural states in vanadium dioxide that can provide a scheme for data storage and processing. The states can be arbitrarily manipulated on short timescales and tracked beyond 10,000 s after excitation, exhibiting features […]
2D boundaries could create electricity
Science Daily August 16, 2022 The presence of piezoelectricity in 2D materials often depends on the number of layers. A team of researchers in the US (Rice University, UCLA, University of Houston, AF Laboratory Wright Patterson FB, Pennsylvania State University) made a one-dimensional, metal-semiconductor junction in a 2D heterostructure. A less than 10 nanometers thick junction was formed when tellurium gas was introduced while molybdenum metal formed a film on silicon dioxide in a chemical vapor deposition furnace. The process created islands of semiconducting molybdenum telluride phases in the sea of metallic phases. Applying voltage to the junction via the […]
A simple way of sculpting matter into complex shapes
Science Daily August 12, 2022 Researchers in the UK modeled propagation of far-red-detuned optical vortex beams through a Bose-Einstein condensate using nonlinear Schrödinger and Gross-Pitaevskii equations. They showed the formation of coupled light-atomic solitons that rotate azimuthally before moving off tangentially, carrying angular momentum. The number, and velocity, of solitons, depends on the orbital angular momentum of the optical field. Using a Bessel-Gauss beam increases radial confinement so that solitons can rotate with fixed azimuthal velocity. According to the researchers the model provides a highly controllable method of channeling a BEC and atomic transport…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE