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Category: materials – Page 201

I guess they can now make the diamond sword from minecraft! 😃

While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature.

Although the idea of creating diamonds in a laboratory in just a few minutes would be an appealing one for jewelers, rappers or those looking to pop a certain question, that’s not quite the aim of this type of research.

Continue reading “Scientists produce rare diamonds in minutes at room temperature” | >

Bringing huge amounts of protons up to speed in the shortest distance in fractions of a second—that’s what laser acceleration technology, greatly improved in recent years, can do. An international research team from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fĂŒr Schwerionenforschung and the Helmholtz Institute Jena, a branch of GSI, in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, U.S., has succeeded in using protons accelerated with the GSI high-power laser PHELIX to split other nuclei and to analyze them. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports and could provide new insights into astrophysical processes.

For less than one picosecond (one trillionth of a second), the PHELIX laser shines its extremely intense light pulse onto a very thin gold foil. This is enough to eject about one trillion hydrogen nuclei (protons), which are only slightly attached to the gold, from the back-surface of the foil, and accelerate them to high energies. “Such a large number of protons in such a short period of time cannot be achieved with standard acceleration techniques,” explains Pascal Boller, who is researching laser acceleration in the GSI research department Plasma Physics/PHELIX as part of his graduate studies. “With this technology, completely new research areas can be opened that were previously inaccessible.”

These include the generation of nuclear fission reactions. For this purpose, the researchers let the freshly generated fast protons impinge on uranium material samples. Uranium was chosen as a case study material because of its large reaction cross-section and the availability of published data for benchmarking purposes. The samples have to be close to the production to guarantee a maximum yield of reactions. The protons generated by the PHELIX laser are fast enough to induce the fission of uranium nuclei into smaller fission products, which remain then to be identified and measured. However, the laser impact has unwanted side effects: It generates a strong electromagnetic pulse and a gammy-ray flash that interfere with the sensitive measuring instruments used for this detection.

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Once again, humans are taking inspiration from nature. The metal is based on Arapaima fish scales that are known to stop Piranha bites. Pretty cool!

Even a waterjet cutter couldn’t get through during testing.

I bet a knight would want his suit based on this! 😃

Proteus could someday be used to create extremely strong and lightweight armor and locks.

Continue reading “Scientists create ‘non-cuttable’ material 85% less dense than steel” | >

Cambridge/Jena (16.11.2020) Linkages between organic and inorganic materials are a common phenomenon in nature, e.g., in the construction of bones and skeletal structures. They often enable combinations of properties that could not be achieved with just one type of material. In technological material development, however, these so-called hybrid materials still represent a major challenge today.

A new class of hybrid glass materials

Researchers from the Universities of Jena (Germany) and Cambridge (GB) have now succeeded in creating a new class of hybrid glass materials that combine organic and inorganic components. To do this, the scientists use special material combinations in which chemical bonds between organometallic and inorganic glasses can be generated. They included materials composed of organometallic networks—so-called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—which have recently been experiencing rapidly increasing research interest. This is primarily because their framework structures can be created in a targeted manner, from the length scale of individual molecules up to a few nanometers. This achieves a control of porosity which can be adapted to a large number of applications, both in terms of the size of the pores and their permeability, and in terms of the chemical properties prevailing on the pore surfaces.

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A 2002 article published in the American Psychological Association’s prevention & treatment, by University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch titled, “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” made some more shocking discoveries. He found that 80 percent of the effect of antidepressants, as measured in clinical trials, could be attributed to the placebo effect. This professor even had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get information on the clinical trials of the top antidepressants.

A Baylor School of Medicine study, published in 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at surgery for patients with severe and debilitating knee pain. Many surgeons know there is no placebo effect in surgery, or so most of them believe. The patients were divided into three groups. The surgeons shaved the damaged cartilage in the knee of one group. For the second group, they flushed out the knee joint, removing all of the material believed to be causing inflammation. Both of these processes are the standard surgeries people go through who have severe arthritic knees. The third group received a “fake” surgery, the patients were only sedated and tricked that they actually had the knee surgery. For the patients not really receiving the surgery, the doctors made the incisions and splashed salt water on the knee as they would in normal surgery. They then sewed up the incisions like the real thing and the process was complete.

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A group of researchers led by Sir Andre Geim and Dr. Alexey Berdyugin at The University of Manchester have discovered and characterized a new family of quasiparticles named ‘Brown-Zak fermions’ in graphene-based superlattices.

The team achieved this breakthrough by aligning the atomic lattice of a layer to that of an insulating boron nitride sheet, dramatically changing the properties of the graphene sheet.

The study follows years of successive advances in graphene-boron nitride superlattices which allowed the observation of a fractal pattern known as the Hofstadter’s butterfly—and today (Friday, November 13) the researchers report another highly surprising behavior of particles in such structures under applied magnetic field.

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In recent years, researchers have been trying to develop new types of highly performing electronic devices. As silicon-based devices are approaching their maximum performance, they have recently started exploring the potential of fabricating electronics using alternative superconductors.

Two-dimensional (2-D) semiconductors, such as graphene or tungsten diselenide (WSe2), are particularly promising for the development of electronics. Unfortunately, however, controlling the electronic properties of these materials can be very challenging, due to the limited amount of space within their lattices to incorporate impurity dopants (a process that is critical for controlling the carrier type and electronic properties of materials).

Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, have recently devised an approach that could enable the development of programmable devices made of 2-D semiconductors. This approach, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, leverages a superionic phase transition in silver iodide to tailor the carrier type within devices made of WSe2 via a process called switchable ionic doping.

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Researchers discover an unexpected new class of superconducting material.

Superconducting materials are traditionally classed into two types: s-wave and d-wave. A third type, p-wave, has long been predicted. Now, however, researchers in the US, Germany and Japan say they may have discovered a fourth, unexpected type of superconductor: g-wave. The result, obtained thanks to high-precision resonant ultrasound spectroscopy measurements on strontium ruthenate, could shed fresh light on the Cooper pairing mechanisms in so-called unconventional superconductors.

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