Cooper pairs in a superconductor split and electrons collected by quantum dots.
Category: materials – Page 214
We’ve finally made a room-temperature superconductor, so materials that transport electricity without wasting any of it are within our grasp.
Exotic and vibrant colors naturally occur in nature because of pigmentations. But nature is also capable of displaying a whole spectrum of eye-catching colors through building nano-scale surface structures. Creatures with intricate physical aesthetics, like a peacock’s feathers or the rich patterns on a butterfly’s wings, achieve this kind of high color resolution due to the small-scale arrays of distinctly shaped objects on their surfaces. This naturally occurring color structure was exploited by a team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). They developed a laser printing technique that doesn’t require ink.
Laser printing without ink
A laser printing technique developed by Anders Kristensen and his DTU team is able to produce high-resolution images without fading away and without using any ink. The team constructed a material called metasurface, which consists of 60 nanometers high columns of plastic. The material’s surface is painted with a coating of germanium, of only 35 nanometers in thickness, then semiconductors are placed on top of the pillars or columns.
Will this enable people to make super strong concrete the future? 🙂
Scientists in Japan have found a rare mineral in concrete walls of a decommissioned power plant, which is as strong as concrete the Romans used.
In groundbreaking materials research, a team led by University of Minnesota Professor K. Andre Mkhoyan has made a discovery that blends the best of two sought-after qualities for touchscreens and smart windows—transparency and conductivity.
The researchers are the first to observe metallic lines in a perovskite crystal. Perovskites abound in the Earth’s center, and barium stannate (BaSnO3) is one such crystal. However, it has not been studied extensively for metallic properties because of the prevalence of more conductive materials on the planet like metals or semiconductors. The finding was made using advanced transmission electron microscopy (TEM), a technique that can form images with magnifications of up to 10 million.
The research is published in Science Advances.
The model is conceived to tackle the Great Pacific garbage patch — an island of plastic about 3 times the size of France.
New research led by researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Northwestern University employs machine learning to craft the best building blocks in the assembly of framework materials for use in a targeted application.
Eighty-six years since electron crystals were first proposed, physicists have now constructed them, trapping electrons in a repeating pattern. The achievement is reported in the journal Nature.
A crystal is made of a repeating pattern of particles but electrons are difficult to keep in place. So an electron crystal is like trying to organize a large number of electrons that won’t stay still — it’s the herding cats of particle physics.
However, this team had an ingenious solution. They built a Wigner crystal using layers of semi-conductors just one atom thick. They then used two different tungsten materials and created a hexagonal pattern known as a moiré superlattice by placing one material on top of the other.
Scientists have created new kinds of ‘living materials’ by tweaking the base ingredients of kombucha – the popular tea drink fermented with a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY).
This kind of ‘tea fungus’ – sometimes called ‘kombucha mother’ – can do a lot more than just produce sour-tasting beverages, it seems.
By modifying the mixture of the culture, researchers were able to make engineered living materials (ELMs) that could one day have all sorts of practical applications, such as sensing light or detecting contaminants.
A new study shows that not even cosmology can verify Einstein’s assumption about the speed of light.
Special relativity is one of the most strongly validated theories humanity has ever devised. It is central to everything from space travel and GPS to our electrical power grid. Central to relativity is the fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute constant. The problem is, that fact has never been proven.
When Einstein proposed the theory of relativity, it was to explain why light always had the same speed. In the late 1800s it was thought that since light travels as a wave it must be carried by some kind of invisible material known as the luminiferous aether. The reasoning was that waves require a medium, such as sound in air or water waves in water. But if the aether exists, then the observed speed of light must change as the Earth moves through the aether. But measurements to observe aether drift came up null. The speed of light appeared to be constant.
Einstein found that the problem was in assuming that space and time were absolute and the speed of light could vary. If instead, you assumed the speed of light was absolute, space and time must be affected by relative motion. It’s a radical idea, but it’s supported by every measurement of light’s constant speed.