Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: materials – Page 2

JWST finds the most distant barred galaxy candidate in the early universe

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified what may be the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever discovered, dating to a time less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The paper outlining its properties was posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 23.

Stellar bars are elongated formations of stars that stretch across a galaxy’s central region, spinning together as a single, unified structure. Through this rotation, they function much like a funnel, channeling gas toward the galactic center. This can ignite bursts of star formation, supply material to the central black hole and contribute to the buildup of a compact core. Such structures are common among galaxies in the local universe, and our own Milky Way is one example of a barred galaxy.

But bars don’t just form anywhere. They take shape in galaxies where stars move in smooth and orderly fashion, with something called a dynamically “cold” disk. Early-universe galaxies were the opposite: turbulent and gas-rich, constantly disrupted by mergers and bursts of star formation, conditions that should keep disks “hot” and unsettled for billions of years.

Optical writing of antiferromagnets points toward new storage devices and energy efficient information systems

A German-Japanese research team involving the University of Augsburg has made a significant breakthrough in the use of antiferromagnets. For the first time, the team has succeeded in writing magnetic information using only ultrashort laser pulses—without the need for electric currents or magnetic fields.

Antiferromagnetic materials are considered promising for the next generation of data storage devices because they react particularly quickly and are insensitive to external disturbances. Until now, however, their application has been limited because their magnetic states are difficult to control precisely.

The research team led by experimental physicist Prof. Dr. István Kézsmárki has now developed a new method in which it is not the polarization of the light, but its direction of propagation (“pulse”), that is used for control. Through targeted irradiation, it is possible to switch between different magnetic states and write information. Furthermore, this information can also be read out using purely optical means. The paper is published in the journal Nature Materials.

Atomic ‘domino effect’ found to drive phase changes in a two-dimensional crystal

Phase transformations—in which a material changes from one crystal structure to another, thereby acquiring dramatically different properties—are ubiquitous in nature. Understanding the microscopic mechanisms of these transformations is essential for controlling material properties and designing functional devices.

A research team led by Profs. Chen Xingqiu and Sun Yan from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Prof. Niu Haiyang from Northwestern Polytechnical University, has uncovered a previously unknown phase transformation mechanism in monolayer molybdenum telluride (MoTe2).

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 29, reveals a phase transformation pathway that is fundamentally distinct from the conventional martensitic model, in which many atoms move together through concerted shear displacements.

Electrical imbalances at grain boundaries help explain solid-state battery failure

Next-generation batteries that use new electrolyte materials could achieve far higher energy density than today’s lithium-ion batteries, without many of the safety concerns. But advanced batteries, such as those that use solid or almost-solid electrolytes, have been plagued by the formation of tiny spikes of lithium metal called dendrites that cause the batteries to lose efficiency and fail.

Exactly how those dendrites form is still up for debate. While the interface between the battery’s electrolyte and electrodes has been the focus of most research, another culprit is the boundary where two grains of electrolyte in a solid material meet. Researchers know these boundaries can seed dendrites within electrolytes, although the effects have been difficult to study.

Now researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have uncovered why such boundaries can lead to dendrites: Hidden electrical imbalances across the boundaries affect how the electrolyte conducts electrical charges, which influences how the ions and electrons move through the material during battery operation.

Earth’s deepest rocks help define upper limit for viscosity beyond which materials effectively become rigid

Viscosity is one of the most fundamental physical properties used to describe how materials flow. It governs the movement of liquids, molten rocks and even slowly deforming regions deep inside the Earth. While scientists have long studied materials with low or moderate viscosities, a simple but important question has remained largely unexplored: Is there a physically meaningful upper limit to viscosity?

Extremely high-viscosity materials are usually composed of rock-forming minerals, which are rarely discussed within the traditional framework of fluid dynamics, leaving this question largely unanswered.

To address this question, a study by Professor Masaki Yoshida from the Department of Physical Sciences, College of Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, investigated whether the Earth’s interior could provide a natural constraint on the highest physically meaningful viscosity over finite timescales.

Controlling magnetic chirality could help memory pack in more data

Magnetic storage devices, like a computer’s hard disk drive, utilize magnets to represent binary data. However, as these devices are downsized, stray magnetic fields generated by individual magnetic components can interact with neighboring elements to cause operational malfunctions, limiting how much data we can densely pack into memory devices.

A joint research team led by Hidetoshi Masuda and Yoshinori Onose from Tohoku University’s Institute for Materials Research—in collaboration with CROSS, J-PARC, Keio University, and Kyoto University—has successfully demonstrated precise, deterministic control over the spiral-handedness (magnetic chirality) in a metallic helimagnet, a material that inherently avoids malfunction-causing crosstalk. Details of their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 16, 2026.

A helimagnet features microscopic atomic magnets arranged in a twisted, spiral pattern. Utilizing its chirality (right-or left-handed mirror images) to represent binary data (“0” and “1”) could enable ultra-high-density storage. While some experiments suggested that this chirality could be controlled by simultaneously applying an electric current and a magnetic field, previous confirmations relied on indirect, macroscopic electrical measurements highly susceptible to experimental artifacts.

Excitons in van der Waals magnetic materials

Abstract:

Two-dimensional magnetic semiconductors provide a unique platform where long-range magnetic order coexists with strongly bound excitons. Because excitonic states and magnetic moments originate from the same electronic orbitals and couple via intrinsic exchange interactions, optical excitations in these systems exhibit pronounced sensitivity to magnetic order. Recent experiments show unusually strong magneto-optical responses and direct exciton–magnon coupling, establishing new routes for controlling light–matter interactions with spin degrees of freedom. This Review surveys key developments, focusing on representative material systems, experimental signatures, and theoretical frameworks used to describe these phenomena. We conclude with perspectives on how this rapidly evolving field could enable next-generation optoelectronic and quantum technologies leveraging the coupled dynamics of light, charge and spin.

In this Review, the interplay of excitons, magnons and photons in two-dimensional magnetic semiconductors and how this enables control of light–matter interactions are discussed, and promising opportunities for magneto-optic optoelectronic and quantum applications are surveyed.

Diffractive networks enable optical information transfer through random and unknown diffusers

The transmission of optical information through random scattering media is a major challenge in optics, biomedical imaging, telecommunications and remote sensing. When light passes through a turbid or diffusive medium, such as biological tissue or a randomly structured optical material, the original image information can be severely distorted, making reliable recovery difficult.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have introduced interleaved diffractive networks to address this challenge by enabling optical information transfer through random and unknown diffusers. The work is published in the journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Russian physicists study laser beam compressed into thin filament

A group of Russian scientists recently presented their research into the process of laser pulse filamentation—the effect produced when a laser beam propagating in air focuses into a filament. The researchers discovered how this process influences the preliminary transition of a beam passing through quartz glass, which has applications in the field of nonlinear optics.

Light propagates in straight lines, and beams of are only reflected or refracted to the side when the properties of the medium it is passing through change. This is the basis of linear optics: it is called ‘linear’ because the division of that occurs when light passes through a medium is linearly dependent on the intensity of the fields in the light wave itself. In other words, the stronger the electric field, the more the different charges are dispersed within the material—the material becomes polarized.

The of a material should not be confused with the . This polarization is characterised by the degree to which the positive and negative charges are dispersed in a substance, and in this way, the presence of specific directions within the electromagnetic wave within which the electric fields vibrate is called polarization.

Blame the model, not the machine—better data helps 3D-printed metamaterials match predictions

Additive manufacturing, such as 3D printing, provides an excellent opportunity to design metamaterials: materials with an engineered structure that leads to desired properties such as, for instance, resistance to vibrations. However, a major challenge was that the predicted metamaterial response often failed to match real-world behavior.

Researchers at the University of Groningen have now shown that the unexpected behavior of 3D-printed metamaterial structures is not due to structural defects, as was commonly believed, but that the material simply needs to be properly characterized to obtain models with high predictive accuracy. The results were published in Materials Horizons on June 3, 2026.

/* */