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New plasma trick could unlock smaller, more powerful computer chips

Under carefully controlled conditions, particles within a plasma can strike the surface of a TMD material and knock atoms loose. The challenge is achieving enough energy to remove sulfur atoms from the top layer without harming the molybdenum layer beneath. Because the difference between success and damage is so small, developing a reliable process has proven difficult.

Using computer simulations, researchers found that treating molybdenum disulfide with oxygen or fluorine before plasma exposure can make the process much more controlled. Their findings were published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Silicon-compatible nanocomposite garnet enables better, simpler optical isolators

A research team from Tohoku University and Kyocera Corp. has developed a new magneto-optical material—a nanocomposite magnetic garnet film—that can be deposited directly onto silicon substrates while delivering a magneto-optical figure of merit four times higher than conventional polycrystalline films.

Using this material, the team demonstrated a monolithically integrated optical isolator on a silicon chip that matches the performance of conventional devices but with a far simpler, seed-layer-free structure. The breakthrough opens a practical path toward large-scale deployment of silicon photonics in AI-era data centers.

The work is published in the journal ACS Applied Optical Materials.

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