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Category: materials – Page 33

Producing superconductors for quantum circuit elements at high temperatures

A project led by the University of Melbourne’s Dr. Manjith Bose and Professor Jeff McCallum, who are also members of the ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, has identified a promising class of superconductors that may potentially avoid the need for high levels of cryogenic cooling. These advanced materials can be manufactured, be integrable and be compatible using standard silicon and superconducting electronics approaches.

To optimize the growth of these silicide superconductors, Dr. Bose and Prof. McCallum are making extensive use of high– neutron reflectometry on the Spatz reflectometer at ANSTO’s Australian Center for Neutron Scattering.

Neutrons are an ideal tool for exploring extreme sample environments, such as the high pressure, temperatures or fields that are present when manufacturing circuit elements. This is because neutrons can penetrate through most common metals, allowing one to see reflective thin films deep inside furnaces, magnets and cryo-chambers.

Your ketchup will see you now: Solid-phase properties reveal when yield stress fluids start to flow

Pounding on the bottom of a glass bottle of ketchup is one of life’s small annoyances. Getting that sweet, red concoction from its solid phase to a liquid takes too long when you’re hungry and could even require messy strategies with a butter knife.

Now a team of scientists has shown that determining the point where the solid transitions to a liquid can be predicted from the properties of the alone. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.

The new work focuses on yielding, a phenomenon where a solid-like material starts to behave like a liquid. “This behavior occurs constantly all around us, from desserts like custards that smoothly flow onto your spoon to personal care products like toothpaste that are easily squeezed out of tubes but hold their shape on your toothbrush,” Ryan Poling-Skutvik of the University of Rhode Island in the United States told Phys.org.

Exploiting the full potential of multiferroic materials for magnetic memory devices

As the digital world demands greater data storage and faster access times, magnetic memory technologies have emerged as a promising frontier. However, conventional magnetic memory devices have an inherent limitation: they use electric currents to generate the magnetic fields necessary to reverse their stored magnetization, leading to energy losses in the form of heat.

This inefficiency has pushed researchers to explore approaches that could further reduce in magnetic memories while maintaining or even enhancing their performance.

Multiferroic materials, which exhibit both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties, have long been considered potential game changers for next-generation memory devices.

Citrus derivative makes transparent wood 100 percent renewable

Five years after introducing see-through wood building material, researchers in Sweden have taken it to another level. They found a way to make their composite 100 percent renewable – and more translucent – by infusing wood with a clear bio-plastic made from citrus fruit.

Since it was first introduced in 2016, transparent wood has been developed by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology as one of the most innovative new structural materials for building construction. It lets natural light through and.

The key to making wood into a transparent composite material is to strip out its lignin, the major light-absorbing component in wood. But the empty pores left behind by the absence of lignin need to be filled with something that restores the wood’s strength and allows light to permeate.

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