Lifeboat Foundation

Silicon anode batteries have the potential to revolutionize energy storage capabilities, which is key to meeting climate goals and unlocking the full potential of electric vehicles.

However, the irreversible depletion of lithium ions in silicon anodes puts a major constraint on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a readily scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process that helps mitigate lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs).

This is according to a press release by the institution published last week.

“We wanted to reduce the effect of the membrane as much as possible, since it’s heavy. But what can be as light as air? The air itself,” explained Stanislav Sergeev, a postdoc at EPFL’s Acoustic Group and first author.

“We first ionize the thin layer of air between the electrodes that we call a plasmacoustic metalayer. The same air particles, now electrically charged, can instantaneously respond to external electrical field commands and effectively interact with sound vibrations in the air around the device to cancel them out.”

Woven across our universe is a weblike structure of galaxies called the cosmic web. Galaxies are strung along filaments in this vast web, which also contains enormous voids. Now, astronomers using Webb have discovered an early strand of this structure, a long, narrow filament of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year.

A light year is the distance that a particle of light (photon) will travel in a year—about 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles). It is a useful unit for measuring distances between stars.

When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy.

These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.

Continue reading “A New Kind of Quantum Computer Could Be Built on The Strange Physics of Sound Waves” »

New research by the University of Liverpool could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.

Published in the journal Nature, Liverpool researchers have shown that a mathematical algorithm can guarantee to predict the structure of any material just based on knowledge of the atoms that make it up.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, the algorithm systematically evaluates entire sets of possible structures at once, rather than considering them one at a time, to accelerate identification of the correct solution.

A new navigation system that tracks subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth could help us get around indoors, underground, and underwater — all the places GPS fails.

The challenge: GPS (the Global Positioning System) is a group of 31 satellites, constantly transmitting radio signals from about 12,500 miles above Earth’s surface. Receivers in phones, cars, planes, and ships then use data from multiple satellites’ signals to calculate their own locations on Earth.

While GPS has revolutionized surface transportation, satellite signals can reflect off solid surfaces, making the navigation system incapable of accurately pinpointing the locations of receivers indoors, underground, and underwater.

A bullet piercing the protective armor of a first responder, a jellyfish stinging a swimmer, micrometeorites striking a satellite: High-speed projectiles that puncture materials show up in many forms. Researchers constantly aim to identify new materials that can better resist these high-speed puncture events, but it has been hard to connect the microscopic details of a promising new material to its actual behavior in real-world situations.

To address this issue, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have designed a method that uses a high-intensity laser to blast microscale projectiles into a small sample at velocities that approach the speed of sound. The system analyzes the energy exchange between the particle and the sample of interest at the micro level then uses scaling methods to predict the puncture resistance of the material against larger energetic projectiles, such as bullets encountered in real-world situations. This new method, described in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, reduces the need to perform a lengthy series of lab experiments with larger projectiles and bigger samples.

“When you’re investigating a new material for its protective applications, you don’t want to waste time, money and energy in scaling up your tests if the material doesn’t pan out. With our new method we can see earlier if it’s worth looking into a material for its protective properties,” said NIST chemist Katherine Evans.

A system using photonics-based synthetic dimensions could be used to help explain complex natural phenomena.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a chip-scale optical quantum simulation system using controlled photon.

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

Elusive neutrinos reveal a portrait of our galaxy unlike any before.