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Category: materials – Page 298

Awesome @ my friends at ORNL! Luv it and expect much success too.

No one knows what the next, best way to build electronic circuits will be. That said there’s no shortage of efforts to invent something beyond current lithography. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, perhaps not surprisingly, is in the thick of the race and two recent studies from ORNL researchers showcase promising but very different approaches.

One method suggests phase change in a single complex oxide material may allow “creating” circuit elements much smaller than in today’s CMOS process while a second study puts STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) to work directly writing tiny patterns in metallic “ink,” forming features in liquid that are finer than half the width of a human hair. Articles describing both are posted on the ORNL web site.

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Advancing efforts around Synthetic Bio into the semiconductor space.

“We hope that ongoing advances in our method may lead to the development of new organic electronic devices, including semiconductor and luminescent materials,” say Segawa and Itam.

Thiophene-fused polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are known to be useful as organic semiconductors due to their high charge transport properties. Scientists have developed a short route to form various thiophene-fused PAHs by simply heating mono-functionalized PAHs with sulfur. This new method is expected to contribute towards the efficient development of novel thiophene-based electronic materials.

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Exclusive: When Israel launched a covert scheme to steal material and secrets to build a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials looked the other way and obstructed investigations, as described in a book reviewed by James DiEugenio.

By James DiEugenio

In 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms was presented with a disturbing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Israel had obtained atomic weapons, a dangerous development that occurred earlier than the CIA had anticipated.

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Spider silk is well-known for its unusual combination of being both lightweight and extremely strong—in some cases, stronger than steel. Due to these properties, researchers have been developing spider-silk-inspired materials for potential applications such as durable yet lightweight clothing, bullet-proof vests, and parachutes.

But so far, the acoustic properties of spider webs have not yet been explored. Now in a new study, a team of researchers from Italy, France and the UK has designed an acoustic metamaterial (which is a material made of periodically repeating structures) influenced by the intricate spider web architecture of the golden silk orb-weaver, also called the Nephila spider.

“There has been much work in the field of metamaterials in recent years to find the most efficient configurations for wave attenuation and manipulation,” coauthor Federico Bosia, a physicist at the University of Torino in Italy, told Phys.org. “We have found that the spider web architecture, combined with the variable elastic properties of radial and circumferential silk, is capable of attenuating and absorbing vibrations in wide frequency ranges, despite being lightweight.”

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Nice.

DARPA-supported researchers have developed a new approach for synthesizing ultrathin materials at room temperature—a breakthrough over industrial approaches that have demanded temperatures of 800 degrees Celsius or more. The advance opens a path to creating a host of previously unattainable thin-film microelectronics, whose production by conventional methods has been impossible because many components lose their critical functions when subjected to high temperatures.

The new method, known as electron-enhanced atomic layer deposition (EE-ALD), was recently developed at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU) as part of DARPA’s Local Control of Materials Synthesis (LoCo) program. The CU team demonstrated room-temperature deposition of silicon and gallium nitride—linchpin elements in many advanced microelectronics—as well as the ability to controllably etch specific materials, leading to precise spatial control in three dimensions. Such a capability is critical as the demand grows for ever-smaller device architectures.

After first demonstrating the process in early 2015, team members went on to perform detailed mechanistic studies to learn how best to exploit and control EE-ALD for film growth. By controlling the electron energy during the ALD cycles, they discovered that they could tune the process to favor either material deposition or removal. The ability to selectively remove (etch) deposited material with electrons under conditions as low as room temperature is unprecedented and is anticipated to enhance film quality. The group is also exploring other methods to etch specific materials—such as aluminum nitride and hafnium oxide, important in specialized electronics applications—showing that they can selectively etch these materials in composites, which provides an attractive alternative to traditional masking approaches.

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A team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers has demonstrated the 3D printing of shape-shifting structures that can fold or unfold to reshape themselves when exposed to heat or electricity. The micro-architected structures were fabricated from a conductive, environmentally responsive polymer ink developed at the Lab.

In an article published recently by the journal Scientific Reports (link is external), Lab scientists and engineers revealed a strategy for creating boxes, spirals and spheres from shape memory polymers (SMPs), bio-based “smart” materials that exhibit shape-changes when resistively heated or when exposed to the appropriate temperature.

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Scientists have managed to develop a novel method to grow stable, ultra-long 1D carbon chains of a material that is twice as strong as carbon nanotubes and far stronger than diamonds.

Elemental carbon is extremely versatile, and scientists have long been able to create new carbon allotropes that make for super durable and multi-functioning materials—such as everyone’s favorite material, graphene.

The “carbon family” is one very resourceful family. But even with all these developments, carbyne remained elusive. In fact, it is the only form of carbon that has not been synthesized, even though researchers have been studying its properties for over 50 years.

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