Nanowerk June 10, 2021 An international team of researchers (Israel, Spain, France, USA – Kansas State University) shone pulses of light along the edge of a 2D material, producing in the material the hybrid sound-light waves. Not only were they able to record these waves, but they also found the pulses could spontaneously speed up and slow down. Surprisingly, the waves even split into two separate pulses, moving at different speeds. They developed a new technique to image the motion of light without disturbing it. According to the researchers having access to the full spatiotemporal dynamics of 2D wave packets […]
Tag Archives: Materials science
New advanced material shows extraordinary stability over wide temperature range
Phys.org June 14, 2021 Researchers in Australia have demonstrated that the zero thermal expansion material made of scandium, aluminum, tungsten, and oxygen did not change in volume from 4 to 1400 Kelvin (-269 to 1126 °Celsius). They confirmed the structural stability of Sc1.5Al0.5W3O12 with only minute changes to the bonds, position of oxygen atoms and rotations of the atom arrangements which appear to be undertaken cooperatively. The crystallographic data from the diffraction experiments reflects the combination of subtle but observable distortions of the polyhedral units, bond lengths, angles and oxygen atoms that allow the material to absorb temperature changes. It […]
Researchers uncover unique properties of a promising new superconductor
Science Daily June 16, 2021 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, China, Switzerland) found that Niobium diselenide (NbSe2) in 2D form is a more resilient superconductor because it has a two-fold symmetry, which is very different from thicker samples of the same material. Despite the six-fold structure, it only showed two-fold behavior in the experiment. They attributed the newly discovered two-fold rotational symmetry of the superconducting state in NbSe2 to the mixing between two closely competing types of superconductivity, namely the conventional s-wave type — typical of […]
Using ‘smart rust’ to mark objects unambiguously and tackle counterfeiting
Nanowerk June 16, 2021 An object can be recycled responsibly only if all raw materials and intermediate products used for manufacturing it is marked unambiguously using a tamper-proof method. Inspired by the variation of a musical ensemble yielding distinguishable overtones, researchers in Germany have developed a magnetic particle-based toolbox that provides more than 77 billion different magnetic codes, adjustable in one single particle, that can be read out unambiguously, easily, and quickly. The variation of the supraparticle composition alters their magnetic overtones. By minimizing magnetic interactions, customizable signals are spectrally decoded by the simple method of magnetic particle spectroscopy. The […]
Lead halide perovskites – a horse of a different color
Nanowerk June 7, 2021 To capture the full range of the photophysical processes that occur in metal halide perovskites an international team of researchers (Sweden, Russia, Germany) has developed a novel spectroscopic technique for the study of charge carrier dynamics in lead halide perovskites. This methodology is based on the complete mapping of the photoluminescence quantum yield and decay dynamics in the 2D space of both fluence and frequency of the excitation light pulse. They offer a complete representation of the sample’s photo physics, allow examining the validity of theories by applying a single set of theoretical equations and parameters to […]
Online ‘library of properties’ helps to create safer nanomaterials
Nanowerk June 8, 2021 Under the European Union H2020-funded NanoSolveIT project an international team of researchers (Cyprus, UK) has developed a decision support system in the form of both stand-alone open software and a freely available cloud library containing full physicochemical characterisation of 69 nanomaterials, plus calculated molecular descriptors to increase the value of the available information. The dataset contains over 70 descriptors per nanomaterial. Over the last two years, this project has already presented some very impressive results with more than 30 publications, making NanoSolveIT one of the most active projects in the nanomaterials safety and informatics space. The […]
Controlling magnetization by surface acoustic waves
Nanowerk May 27, 2021 Interconversion between electron spin and other forms of angular momentum is useful for spin-based information processing. Well-studied examples of this are the conversion of photon angular momentum and rotation into ferromagnetic moment. Recently, several theoretical studies have suggested that the circular vibration of atoms work as phonon angular momentum; however, conversion between phonon angular momentum and spin-moment has yet to be demonstrated. Researchers in Japan demonstrated that the phonon angular momentum of surface acoustic wave can control the magnetization of a ferromagnetic Ni film by means of the phononic-to-electronic conversion of angular momentum in a Ni/LiNbO3 […]
A new direction of topological research is ready for take off
Phys.org June 1, 2021 An international team of researchers (Germany, Italy, USA – University of Maryland) has accomplished synthetic topological matter in electric circuit networks. The main motif of topological matter is its role in hosting particularly stable and robust features immune to local perturbations, which might be a pivotal ingredient for future quantum technologies. The current results promise a knowledge transfer from electric circuits to alternative optical platforms. Topolectric circuits create an experimental and theoretical inspiration for new avenues of topological matter and might have a particular bearing on future applications in photonics. The flexibility, cost-efficiency, and versatility of […]
New quantum material discovered
Nanowerk May 26, 2021 Usually, quantum critical behaviour is studied in metals or insulators. But an international team of researchers (USA – Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, NIST, Rice University, Austria) looked at a semimetal which is a compound of cerium, ruthenium, and tin – with properties that lie between those of metals and semiconductors. Usually, quantum criticality can only be created under specific environmental conditions however, this semimetal turned out to be quantum critical without any external influences at all. They suspect that it may be because it has a highly correlated electron system where the electrons interact […]
One material, two functionalities
Nanowerk May 25, 2021 Flexible metamaterials often harness zero-energy deformation modes. To date they have a single property, such as a single shape change, or are pluripotent. An international team of researchers (the Netherlands, Switzerland) has introduced a class of oligomodal metamaterials that encode a few distinct properties that can be selectively controlled under uniaxial compression. They demonstrated this concept by introducing a combinatorial design space containing various families of metamaterials. They included monomodal (with a single zero-energy deformation mode); oligomodal (with a constant number of zero-energy deformation modes); and plurimodal (with many zero-energy deformation modes), whose number increases with system […]