IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Toponium discovery at CERN could revolutionize our understanding of particle physics. 📊 The CMS collaboration detected an unexpected excess of top quark-antiquark pairs, hinting at this elusive particle. 🚀 If confirmed, toponium would be the smallest hadron ever discovered, challenging existing theories. 🧩 Researchers aim to refine their models and collaborate
Here we report on low temperature transport measurements of encapsulated bilayer graphene nano constrictions fabricated employing electrode-free AFM-based local anodic oxidation (LAO) nanolithography. This technique allows for the creation of constrictions as narrow as 20 nm. While larger constrictions exhibit an enhanced energy gap, single quantum dot (QD) formation is observed within smaller constrictions with addition energies exceeding 100 meV, which surpass previous experiments on patterned QDs. These results suggest that transport through these narrow constrictions is governed by edge disorder combined with quantum confinement effects. Our findings introduce electrode-free AFM-LAO lithography as an easy and flexible method for creating nanostructures with tunable electronic properties without relying on patterning techniques such as e-beam lithography. The excellent control and reproducibility provided by this technique opens exciting opportunities for carbon-based quantum electronics and spintronics.
Citation.
Physical Review B
In seawater, boron exists as electrically neutral boric acid, so it passes through reverse osmosis membranes that typically remove salt by repelling electrically charged atoms and molecules called ions. To get around this problem, desalination plants normally add a base to their treated water, which causes boric acid to become negatively charged. Another stage of reverse osmosis removes the newly charged boron, and the base is neutralized afterward by adding acid. Those extra treatment steps can be costly.
“Our device reduces the chemical and energy demands of seawater desalination, significantly enhancing environmental sustainability and cutting costs by up to 15 percent, or around 20 cents per cubic meter of treated water,” said Weiyi Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University and a study co-first author.
Dr. Ho Seong Jang and colleagues at the Extreme Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed an upconversion nanoparticle technology that introduces a core@multi-shell nanostructure, a multilayer structure in which multiple layers of shells surround a central core particle, and enables high color purity RGB light emission from a single nanoparticle by adjusting the infrared wavelength.
The work is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Luminescent materials are materials that light up on their own and are used in a variety of display devices, including TVs, tablets, monitors, and smartphones, to allow us to view a variety of images and videos. However, conventional two-dimensional flat displays cannot fully convey the three-dimensional dimensionality of the real world, limiting the sense of depth.
Technology for converting solar energy into thermal energy is ever evolving and has numerous applications. A breakthrough in the laboratory of Professor My Ali El Khakani at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has made a significant contribution to the field.
Professor El Khakani specializes in plasma-laser processes for the development of nanostructured materials. He and his team at the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Center have developed a new photothermal material that converts sunlight into heat with unmatched efficiency. The results of their work were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
For several decades, stoichiometric titanium oxides have been known for their exceptional photocatalytic properties. A sub-stoichiometric form of this material, characterized by a slight deficiency in oxygen atoms, is referred to as “Magnéli phases,” with specific compositions exhibiting distinct properties.
Quasicrystals (QCs) are fascinating solid materials that exhibit an intriguing atomic arrangement. Unlike regular crystals, in which atomic arrangements have an ordered repeating pattern, QCs display long-range atomic order that is not periodic. Due to this ‘quasiperiodic’ nature, QCs have unconventional symmetries that are absent in conventional crystals.
Since their Nobel Prize-winning discovery, condensed matter physics researchers have dedicated immense attention toward QCs, attempting to both realize their unique quasiperiodic magnetic order and their possible applications in spintronics and magnetic refrigeration.
Ferromagnetism was recently discovered in the gold-gallium-rare earth (Au-Ga-R) icosahedral QCs (iQCs). Yet scientists were not surprised by this observation because translational periodicity—the repeating arrangement of atoms in a crystal—is not a prerequisite for the emergence of ferromagnetic order.
In a surprising twist, a graduate student at UMass Amherst discovered a strange new fluid behavior that seems to defy thermodynamics.
While experimenting with oil, water, and magnetized nickel particles, he found that no matter how hard the mixture was shaken, it would always return to the same elegant urn shape. This behavior sparked curiosity among physicists, who eventually traced the cause to unusually strong magnetism altering the way the fluids interact. Though it has no immediate use, the finding opens new frontiers in soft-matter science.
A surprising discovery in soft matter.