Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 57

New chainmail-like material could be the future of armor

In a remarkable feat of chemistry, a Northwestern University-led research team has developed the first two-dimensional (2D) mechanically interlocked material.

Resembling the interlocking links in chainmail, the nanoscale material exhibits exceptional flexibility and strength. With further work, it holds promise for use in high-performance, light-weight body armor and other uses that demand lightweight, flexible and tough materials.

Publishing on Jan. 17 in the journal Science, the study marks several firsts for the field. Not only is it the first 2D mechanically interlocked , but the novel material also contains 100 trillion mechanical bonds per 1 square centimeter—the highest density of mechanical bonds ever achieved.

Skin-inspired optical sensor reads Braille at the speed of touch

An international team of chemists has successfully created methylenedistibiranes, which are three-membered rings that have two antimony atoms and one carbon atom. In their paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the group describes how they were able to make the rings using just a three-step process.

Methylenedistibiranes are generally used as intermediaries due to their ability to promote selective nucleophilic substitution, resulting in the creation of diantimonyl anions. Chemists have been wanting to be able to create them because it is difficult to use natural elements due to orbital overlap. The achievement by the team is noteworthy because making similar rings with heavier pnictogen elements like and bismuth has proven to be challenging due to changes in orbital overlap trends and energies.

To create the three-membered rings, the research team first synthesized diazadistiboylidenes using [3+2]-cycloaddition between distibene and diazoolefins, which are five-membered rings that have dual antimony, nitrogen and . The resulting stiboylidene served as an intermediary to promote the substitution of a species with bonds formed during donation of electron pairs. The researchers note that it was a surprise to them that the reaction worked as well as it did, since there are few examples of small ring formation with more than one antimony atom.

‘Magic-wavelength optical tweezers’ achieve quantum entanglement of molecules

Harnessing molecular connections: unlocking long-lasting quantum entanglement.

Quantum entanglement—the mysterious connection that links particles no matter the distance between them—is a cornerstone for developing advanced technologies like quantum computing and precision measurement tools. While significant strides have been made in controlling simpler particles such as atoms, extending this control to more complex systems like molecules has remained challenging due to their intricate structures and sensitivity to their surroundings.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers have achieved long-lived quantum entanglement between pairs of ultracold polar molecules using a highly controlled environment known as “magic-wavelength optical tweezers.” These tweezers manipulate molecules with extraordinary precision, stabilizing their complex internal states, such as vibrations and rotations, while enabling detectable, fine-scale interactions.

The team successfully created a “Bell state,” a hallmark of quantum entanglement, with pairs of molecules. While some minor errors reduced the initial fidelity of the entangled state, correcting for these issues revealed that the entanglement could persist for remarkably long times—measured in seconds. This is a significant achievement, as second-scale lifetimes are exceptional in the quantum realm.

This breakthrough has far-reaching implications. Long-lived molecular entanglement could enhance quantum sensing technologies, provide new avenues for exploring chemical reactions at ultracold temperatures, and expand the potential of molecules as quantum bits (qubits) in simulations and memory storage for quantum computing. By unlocking the ability to precisely control and entangle molecules, scientists are paving the way for novel applications across quantum science, leveraging the rich internal dynamics of molecular systems.

Researchers at Durham University have successfully demonstrated long-lasting quantum entanglement between molecules, opening new doors for future advancements in quantum computing, sensing, and fundamental physics. The paper is published in the journal Nature.

Continue reading “‘Magic-wavelength optical tweezers’ achieve quantum entanglement of molecules” | >

Silicon Photonics Breakthrough: The “Last Missing Piece” Now a Reality

International research team unveils the first electrically pumped continuous-wave semiconductor laser designed for seamless integration with silicon.

Scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), the University of Stuttgart, the Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics (IHP), and their French partner CEA-Leti have successfully developed the first electrically pumped continuous-wave semiconductor laser made entirely from group IV elements, commonly referred to as the “silicon group” in the periodic table.

This innovative laser is constructed from stacked ultrathin layers of silicon-germanium-tin and germanium-tin. Remarkably, it is the first laser of its type to be directly grown on a silicon wafer, paving the way for advancements in on-chip integrated photonics. The research findings have been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

Constraining Light QCD Axions with Isolated Neutron Star Cooling

Back in the old days—the really old days—the task of designing materials was laborious. Investigators, over the course of 1,000-plus years, tried to make gold by combining things like lead, mercury, and sulfur, mixed in what they hoped would be just the right proportions. Even famous scientists like Tycho Brahe, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton tried their hands at the fruitless endeavor we call alchemy.

Materials science has, of course, come a long way. For the past 150 years, researchers have had the benefit of the periodic table of elements upon which to draw, which tells them that different elements have different properties, and one can’t magically transform into another. Moreover, in the past decade or so, machine learning tools have considerably boosted our capacity to determine the structure and physical properties of various and substances.

New research by a group led by Ju Li—the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor of Nuclear Engineering at MIT and professor of and engineering—offers the promise of a major leap in capabilities that can facilitate materials design. The results of their investigation appear in Nature Computational Science.

Scientists engineer nanostructured surfaces hostile to bacteria but friendly to cells

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created nanostructured alumina surfaces which are strongly antibacterial but can be used to culture cells. They found that anodic porous alumina (APA) surfaces prepared using electrochemistry in concentrated sulfuric acid had unprecedented resistance to bacterial growth, but did not hamper cell cultures.

The work is published in the journal Langmuir.

The team’s technology promises to have a big impact on regenerative medicine, where high quality cell cultures without bacterial contamination may be produced without antibiotics.

Quantum Algorithms Could Prompt Faster Solutions For Complex Simulations

Quantum computers may soon dramatically enhance our ability to solve problems modeled by nonreversible Markov chains, according to a study published on the pre-print server arXiv.

The researchers from Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Sorbonne University, demonstrated that quantum algorithms could achieve exponential speedups in sampling from such chains, with the potential to surpass the capabilities of classical methods. These advances — if fully realized — have a range of implications for fields like drug discovery, machine learning and financial modeling.

Markov chains are mathematical frameworks used to model systems that transition between various states, such as stock prices or molecules in motion. Each transition is governed by a set of probabilities, which defines how likely the system is to move from one state to another. Reversible Markov chains — where the probability of moving from, let’s call them, state A to state B equals the probability of moving from B to A — have traditionally been the focus of computational techniques. However, many real-world systems are nonreversible, meaning their transitions are biased in one direction, as seen in certain biological and chemical processes.

Fully recyclable carbon nanotube fibers have far-reaching implications for manufacturing across sectors

In a significant step toward creating a sustainable and circular economy, Rice University researchers have published a study in the journal Carbon demonstrating that carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers can be fully recycled without any loss in their structure or properties. This discovery positions CNT fibers as a sustainable alternative to traditional materials like metals, polymers and the much larger carbon fibers, which are notoriously difficult to recycle.

“Recycling has long been a challenge in the materials industry—metals recycling is often inefficient and energy-intensive, polymers tend to lose their properties after reprocessing and carbon fibers cannot be recycled at all, only downcycled by chopping them up into short pieces,” said corresponding author Matteo Pasquali, director of Rice’s Carbon Hub and the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science and NanoEngineering and Chemistry.

“As CNT fibers are being scaled up, we asked whether and how these new materials could be recycled in the future so as to proactively avoid waste management problems that emerged as other engineered materials reached large-scale use. We expected that recycling would be difficult and would lead to significant loss of properties. Surprisingly, we found that fibers far exceed the recyclability potential of existing engineered materials, offering a solution to a major environmental issue.”

Amplification trick makes water toxin detection 10 times more sensitive

An unplugged electric instrument may function, but it sounds much better when it is connected to an amplifier. Similarly, toxins and other small molecules at low concentrations in the environment or human body may emit quiet signals that are undetectable without specialized lab technology.

Now, thanks to a “cool trick” in biochemistry used to adapt a sensing platform already being deployed by Northwestern scientists to measure toxins in drinking water, researchers can detect and even measure chemicals at low enough concentrations to have use outside the lab. By attaching circuitry akin to a volume knob to “turn up” weak signals, the team has opened the door for the system to be applied to disease detection and monitoring in the human body for like DNA and RNA, as well as bacteria such as E. coli.

The results, which describe a system that is 10 times more sensitive than previous cell-free sensors built by the team, are published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.