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Category: materials – Page 3

Elastic rules may explain why nematic crystals look ordered and disordered at once

Electronic nematicity is a phase of some crystalline solids in which electrons’ collective properties, such as charge or spin densities, organize themselves into ordered patterns, lowering the crystal’s rotational symmetry. This phase is found across a wide range of diverse materials, making nematicity crucial to understanding emergent solid-state phenomena, such as unconventional superconductivity and magnetism.

Lately, experimentalists have encountered a hurdle to understanding nematicity: despite exhibiting nematic order at macroscopic scales, at the microscopic level, many nematic materials seem to exhibit disorder instead.

To address this seeming paradox, theorists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have invented a new way of looking at the interactions between nematicity and elasticity, incorporating aspects of elasticity theory, whose impacts on nematicity have previously been overlooked.

Magnetic fields can ‘revive’ superconductivity in nickelates, research reveals

A research team led by Professor Denver Li Danfeng, Associate Dean (Research and Postgraduate Education) of the College of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), has achieved a significant advance in superconducting materials.

The team has discovered a magnetic-field-induced “re-entrant superconductivity” phenomenon in infinite-layer nickelate superconductors, in which superconductivity—initially suppressed by a magnetic field—reappears at higher field strengths. This finding challenges the conventional understanding that magnetic fields suppress superconductivity and opens up new directions for exploring unconventional superconducting mechanisms and next-generation superconducting materials.

The findings are published in Nature, titled “Field re-entrant superconductivity in Eu-doped infinite-layer nickelates.”

Hidden 3D atomic structure of relaxor ferroelectrics revealed for first time

Materials called relaxor ferroelectrics have been used for decades in technologies like ultrasounds, microphones, and sonar systems. Their unique properties come from their atomic structure, but that structure has stubbornly eluded direct measurement.

Now a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has directly characterized the three-dimensional atomic structure of a relaxor ferroelectric for the first time. The findings, reported in Science, provide a framework for refining models used to design next-generation computing, energy, and sensing devices.

“Now that we have a better understanding of exactly what’s going on, we can better predict and engineer the properties we want materials to achieve,” says corresponding author James LeBeau, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

PCB prices have risen by up to 40% due to war in Iran, according to Reuters’ industry sources

According to “industry sources and executives” known to Reuters, the war in Iran is affecting the supply of materials that are crucial for Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), which has made them shoot up in price. Reuters says that, cccording to Goldman Sachs, PCB prices in April shot up by as much as 40% since March.

According to the news agency, “Iran struck Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex in early April, forcing a halt in production of high-purity polyphenylene ether (PPE) resin—a critical base material used to ⁠manufacture PCB laminates.”

Rethinking robotics with physical intelligence

Today’s advances in robotics are often driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and perception. But in complex and constrained environments, the limiting factor is often hardware, not software. Systems that rely on constant data processing, high-bandwidth communication, and centralized compute can face delays, power constraints, and vulnerabilities that limit performance or prevent mission success altogether.

DARPA is looking to tackle these challenges by embedding intelligence directly into the physical materials of robotic systems. A new Request for Information (RFI), calls on the research community to help define a new class of materials capable of intermixed sensing, adapting, and acting in real time without relying on continuous external computation or communication links.

While the RFI itself is exploratory, it is a first step toward a more immediate opportunity: an invite-only, in-person workshop planned for the summer 2026. Selected participants will have the chance to present their ideas, engage with DARPA, and inform future program directions.

Microscopic sensors uncover how liquids turn glassy without structural change

A scientific discovery by researchers at Tel Aviv University’s School of Chemistry offers a new perspective on a long-standing scientific mystery: how does a flowing liquid suddenly become a rigid, almost frozen material, without changing its structure? This phenomenon, known as the “glass transition,” has puzzled physicists for over a hundred years. The study proposes a new experimental approach to observing this elusive process—by tracking the motion of tiny particles that serve as microscopic “sensors” within the material.

The study was conducted by Prof. Haim Diamant and Prof. Yael Roichman of the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, together with the research group of Prof. Stefan Egelhaaf at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. The findings were published in the journal Nature Physics.

A drug discovery bottleneck? How cheaper reagents could speed branched molecule synthesis

When chemists design drug candidates, shape matters enormously. Many active pharmaceutical ingredients contain branched carbon structures—points where the molecular chain forks in a specific direction—that are critical to whether a molecule will bind to its biological target and whether it will be safe. The challenge is that the branched building blocks used to create these structures are not very abundant or commercially available. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have devised a new approach to building these branched molecular structures found in many medicines and materials: one that could make the early stages of drug discovery faster and more efficient.

The method, published in Science, overcomes a stubborn technical obstacle that has limited chemists’ ability to assemble complex molecules from simple, inexpensive starting materials.

“This work solves a selectivity problem that challenged us for years,” says Ryan Shenvi, professor at Scripps Research and senior author of the study. “We’ve now laid the groundwork to access iteratively branching materials that occur in metabolites, fragrances and drugs.”

Investigating the disordered heart of glass

Recent research led by the University of Trento reveals that fundamental atomic vibrations remain unchanged also in ultra-stable glasses. This discovery advances the decade-long debate on the physics of disorder and opens the way to new applications, from electronics to pharmaceuticals. The research work was carried out by the Department of Physics in collaboration with other European research institutions and published in Physical Review X.

We are used to thinking of glass as a fragile and common material, but glass is still one of the greatest enigmas for physics. In crystals, atoms are arranged in geometric order, while chaos reigns in glass. This disorder generates unique properties, especially near absolute zero, where the glass behaves very differently from crystals. A study conducted by the Department of Physics of the University of Trento in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble and other European research centers sheds new light on this mystery.

The working group analyzed the so-called ultra-stable glasses, which are produced with advanced techniques that make them perfect candidates for the title of “ideal glass.” The first author of the paper is Irene Festi, who worked on the project for her Ph.D. thesis at the Department of Physics of the University of Trento. Giacomo Baldi, professor of Experimental Physics of Matter and head of the Laboratory of Structure and Dynamics of Complex Systems at the same Department of UniTrento, is the scientific coordinator of the study.

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