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Blog – Page 1946

A strange phase of matter that previously existed purely in the realm of theory has finally been detected in a real material.

It’s known as the Bragg glass phase – a strange, seemingly paradoxical arrangement of atoms in a glass material where the particles are nearly as ordered as those in a perfect crystal. Scientists weren’t even sure Bragg glass existed, but there it was, hiding in an alloy of palladium inserted between layers of terbium and tellurium (PdxErTe3).

The discovery, led by physicist Krishnanand Mallayya of Cornell University and published in Nature Physics, not only sheds light on the way materials can behave but demonstrates a powerful new set of techniques for probing the atomic structures of exotic materials.

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Manuela Campanelli to lead research team studying electromagnetic signals from merging supermassive black holes.

Rochester Institute of Technology scientists will be the lead researchers on a $1.8 million NASA grant to study electromagnetic signals from merging supermassive black holes.

RIT’s Manuela Campanelli, Distinguished Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and director of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, will lead the collaborative project with help from Yosef Zlochower, professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. The project will also include researchers from the University of Idaho, Johns Hopkins University, and the Goddard Space Flight Center.

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High NA EUV is the next step in smaller transistors. Like NXE systems, it uses EUV light to print tiny features on silicon wafers. And by turning the NA knob, we deliver even better resolution: The new platform, known as EXE, offers chipmakers a CD (critical dimension) of 8 nm. That means they can print transistors 1.7 times smaller – and therefore achieve transistor densities 2.9 times higher – than they can with NXE systems.

Above – High NA EUV mirror testing at ZEISS (Credit: ZEISS SMT)

EUV lithography allowed us to make a big turn of the wavelength knob. It uses 13.5 nm light, compared to 193 nm for the highest-resolution DUV systems. The first pre-production EUV lithography platform, the NXE, shipped in 2010 and delivered a drop in CD (critical dimension) from more than 30 nm in DUV down to 13 nm with EUV.

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Scientists have found that the growth patterns of trees in a forest differ significantly from the way branches expand on an individual tree.

Nature is full of surprising repetitions. In trees, the large branches often look like entire trees, while smaller branches and twigs look like the larger branches they grow from. If seen in isolation, each part of the tree could be mistaken for a miniature version of itself.

It has long been assumed that this property, called fractality, also applies to entire forests but researchers from the University of Bristol have found that this is not the case.

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