After thousands of years as a highly valuable commodity, silk continues to surprise. Now it may help usher in a whole new direction for microelectronics and computing.
While silk protein has been deployed in designer electronics, its use is currently limited in part because silk fibers are a messy tangle of spaghetti-like strands.
Imagine being able to see electrons — the tiny particles that buzz around atoms — in action, darting and swirling in their frenetic dance. This isn’t science fiction anymore.
Scientists have recently developed a state-of-the-art microscope that allows us to observe these elusive particles moving at unimaginable speeds, revealing the intricate behaviors and interactions that occur at the atomic level.
This innovative technology opens up new frontiers for research in physics and materials science, providing unprecedented insights into the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Bioactive glasses, a filling material which can bond to tissue and improve the strength of bones and teeth, has been combined with gallium to create a potential treatment for bone cancer.
Tests in labs have found that bioactive glasses doped with the metal have a 99 percent success rate of eliminating cancerous cells and can even regenerate diseased bones.
The research was conducted by a team of Aston University scientists led by Professor Richard Martin who is based in its College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
In 2018, a discovery in materials science sent shock waves throughout the community. A team showed that stacking two layers of graphene at a precise magic angle turned it into a superconductor, says Ritesh Agarwal of the University of Pennsylvania. This sparked the field of twistronics, revealing that twisting layered materials could unlock extraordinary material properties.
Building on this concept, Agarwal, Penn theoretical physicist Eugene Mele, and collaborators have taken twistronics into new territory. In a study published in Nature (“Opto-twistronic Hall effect in a three-dimensional spiral lattice”), they investigated spirally stacked tungsten disulfide (WS 2) crystals and discovered that, by twisting these layers, light could be used to manipulate electrons. The result is analogous to the Coriolis force, which curves the paths of objects in a rotating frame, like how wind and ocean currents behave on Earth.
“What we discovered is that by simply twisting the material, we could control how electrons move,” says Agarwal, Srinivasa Ramanujan Distinguished Scholar in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This phenomenon was particularly evident when the team shined circularly polarized light on WS 2 spirals, causing electrons to deflect in different directions based on the material’s internal twist.
New software simulates complex wave scattering for metamaterial design. Could invisibility cloaks become a reality? New research brings this science fiction concept a step closer, with a breakthrough software package that simulates how waves interact with complex materials.
A new software package developed by researchers at Macquarie University can accurately model the way waves — sound, water or light — are scattered when they meet complex configurations of particles.
This will vastly improve the ability to rapidly design metamaterials — exciting artificial materials used to amplify, block or deflect waves.
A groundbreaking study by researchers from the University of Toronto, has revealed a phenomenon where photons were seen exiting a material before they entered it. This observation, marking the first evidence of negative time, was made during an experiment involving atomic excitation. The team has been investigating this light-matter interaction for seven years.