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University of Missouri researchers have developed a way to create complex devices with multiple materials—including plastics, metals and semiconductors—all with a single machine.

The research, which was recently published in Nature Communications, outlines a novel 3D printing and laser process to manufacture multi-material, multi-layered sensors, circuit boards and even textiles with electronic components.

It’s called the Freeform Multi-material Assembly Process, and it promises to revolutionize the fabrication of new products.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers unveiled previously unobserved phenomena in an ultra-clean sample of the correlated metal SrVO3. The study offers experimental insights that challenge the prevailing theoretical models of these unusual metals.

The international research team—from the Paul Drude Institute of Solid State Electronics (PDI), Germany; Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Pennsylvania State University; University of Pittsburgh; the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute; and University of Minnesota—believes their findings will prompt a re-evaluation of current theories on electron correlation effects, shedding light on the origins of valuable phenomena in these systems, including , , and the unique characteristics of highly unusual transparent metals.

The perovskite oxide material SrVO3 is classified as a Fermi liquid—a state describing a system of interacting electrons in a metal at sufficiently low temperatures.

“People are always searching for chiral ground states,” McQueeney said. “The reason we use the concept of quasiparticle here is because it is a way of transmitting energy or information, like an electron is a quasiparticle, and we can send it from point A to point B, carrying some information.

A chiral quasiparticle would have other attributes to it. It would have a handedness, for example, and so you could think about novel ways to, say, transmit information from point A to point B, which didn’t involve moving a charge, but moving some chiral signal.

Discovering this new chiral excitation was especially exciting for McQueeney, You don’t expect it to be there, he said. And we still don’t understand why it’s there. As a matter of fact, we’re setting up other experiments to look for it in other materials.

Does proton decay exist and how do we search for it? This is what a recently submitted study to the arXiv preprint server hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigate a concept of using samples from the moon to search for evidence of proton decay, which remains a hypothetical type of particle decay that has yet to be observed and continues to elude particle physicists.