Scientists have discovered a way to efficiently transfer electrical current through specific materials at room temperature, a finding that could revolutionize superconductivity and reshape energy preservation and generation.
The paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The much-sought-after breakthrough hinges on applying high pressure to certain materials, forcing their electrons closer together and unlocking extraordinary electronic behaviors.
Scientists at the University of Oxford demonstrate an approach to interpreting how materials interact with polarized light, which could help advance biomedical imaging and material design.
Their work, reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, focuses on improving how researchers analyze a key optical property known as the retarder.
In optics, a retarder is a material or device that changes the way light waves are oriented as they pass through. Light waves have an orientation called polarization, and a retarder shifts the phase between different components of that light—essentially delaying one part of the wave compared to another.
Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), enable unprecedented opportunities to solve the bottleneck of transistor scaling and to build novel logic circuits with faster speeds, lower power consumption, flexibility and transparency, benefiting from their ultra-thin thickness, dangling-bond-free flat surface and excellent gate controllability.
Tremendous efforts have been devoted to exploring the scaled-up potentials of monolayer MoS2, including both wafer-scale synthesis of high-quality materials and large-area devices. For instance, four-inch wafer-scale monolayer MoS2 with large domain sizes (up to ~300 μm) and record-high electronic quality (average field-effect mobility of ~80 cm2·V-1 ·s-1) has already been demonstrated via van der Waals epitaxial growth.
In terms of a further improvement of the electronic quality of the large-scale monolayer MoS2, structural imperfections should be eliminated as much as possible; however, there is not much space left for monolayer MoS2 after ten years of synthesis optimizations in this field. Another key direction is to switch to multilayer MoS2, e.g., bilayers and trilayers, since they have intrinsically higher electronic quality than monolayers and thus are conducive to higher-performance devices and logic circuits. However, due to the fundamental limitation of thermodynamics, it is still a great challenge to realize wafer-scale multilayer MoS2 with high-quality and large-scale uniformity.
Carbon capture is becoming essential for industries that still depend on fossil fuels, including the cement and steel industries. Natural-gas power plants, coal plants, and cement factories all release large amounts of CO₂, and reducing those emissions is difficult without dedicated capture systems. Today, most plants rely on solvent-based systems that absorb CO₂, but these setups use a lot of heat, require major infrastructure, and can be costly to run.
A smaller, electricity-driven alternative is what the field calls a “membrane” system. A membrane works like an ultra-fine filter that lets certain gases slip through more easily than others, separating CO₂ from the rest of the flue gas. The problem is that many membranes lose efficiency when CO₂ levels are low, which is common in natural-gas plants, and this limits where they can be used.
A new study at EPFL has now analyzed how a new membrane material, pyridinic-graphene, could work at scale. This is a single-layer graphene sheet with tiny pores that favor CO₂ over other gases. The researchers combined experimental performance data with modeling tools that simulate real operating conditions, such as energy use and gas flow. They also explored a wide range of cost scenarios to see how the material might behave once deployed in commercial plants.
Using a dual-cation substitution approach, researchers at Science Tokyo introduced ferromagnetism into bismuth ferrite, a well-known and promising multiferroic material for next-generation memory technologies. By replacing ions at both the bismuth and iron sites with calcium ions and heavier elements, they modified the spin structure and achieved ferromagnetism at room temperature. Additionally, negative thermal expansion was observed. This ability to engineer magnetism and thermal expansion in a multiferroic material aids in realizing future memory devices.
Multiferroic materials, which show both ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism, hold strong potential for use in low-power memory devices where information can be written electrically and read magnetically. Among these materials, bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) is one of the most widely studied because it combines ferroelectricity with antiferromagnetism at room temperature.
However, BiFeO3 naturally forms a cycloidal spin structure, which is a wave-like pattern of rotating spins. This pattern cancels out any net magnetization and makes the material difficult to use in magnetic devices.
Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have designed a new material for insulating windows that could improve the energy efficiency of buildings worldwide—and it works a bit like a high-tech version of Bubble Wrap.
The team’s material, called Mesoporous Optically Clear Heat Insulator (MOCHI), comes in large slabs or thin sheets that can be applied to the inside of any window. So far, the team only makes the material in the lab, and it’s not available for consumers. But the researchers say MOCHI is long-lasting and is almost completely transparent.
That means it won’t disrupt your view, unlike many insulating materials on the market today.
Over the past decades, engineers have introduced numerous technologies that rely on light and its underlying characteristics. These include photonic and quantum systems that could advance imaging, communication and information processing.
A key challenge that has so far limited the performance of these new technologies is that most materials used to fabricate them have a weak optical nonlinearity. This essentially means that they do not strongly change in response to light of different intensities.
A strong optical linearity is of crucial importance for the development of ultrafast optical switches, devices that can control either light or electrical signals by modulating the properties of a light-based signal (e.g. its intensity or path). Notably, these switches are central components of fiber optics-based communication systems, photonic devices and quantum technologies.
This week, at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2025), imec, a research and innovation hub in advanced semiconductor technologies, successfully demonstrated the integration of colloidal quantum dot photodiodes (QDPDs) on metasurfaces developed on its 300 mm CMOS pilot line. This pioneering approach enables a scalable platform for the development of compact, miniaturized shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectral sensors, setting a new standard for cost-effective and high-resolution spectral imaging solutions.
Short-wave infrared (SWIR) sensors offer unique capabilities. By detecting wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum, they can reveal contrasts and features invisible to the human eye and can therefore see through certain materials such as plastics or fabrics, or challenging conditions like haze and smoke. Conventional SWIR sensors remain, however, expensive, bulky, and challenging to manufacture, restricting their use to niche applications.
Quantum dot (QD) image sensors, a new class of SWIR sensors, offer a promising alternative, combining lower cost with higher resolution. So far, however, they have operated in broadband rather than in spectral mode.
Running a synchrotron light source is a massive team effort that brings hundreds of highly skilled and specialized professionals together. The radiofrequency (RF) group at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, plays an integral role in synchrotron operations. The work they do, often behind the scenes, ensures that the electron beam that enables cutting-edge science at NSLS-II remains bright, powerful, and stable.
The electrons that circle through NSLS-II’s nearly half-mile-long storage ring lose energy as they produce X-rays, which scientists use to perform a variety of experiments at the facility. To keep the beam moving steadily, the electrons pass through hollow RF cavities. These cavities, tuned to a precise frequency, restore the electrons’ energy each time they pass through.
When cooled to cryogenic temperatures, the material that the cavities are comprised of, niobium, takes on superconducting properties that nearly eliminate electrical resistance and drastically improve energy efficiency and beam stability. The design also allows unwanted high-frequency oscillations to be safely damped, ensuring a stable, high-intensity X-ray beam.