The discovery makes sense: Mollusks use these teeth to excavate rocks while they feed.
Category: materials – Page 106
Shadows and Light: Discovering the Hidden Depths of Quantum Materials
Scientists used a laser-based technique to reveal hidden quantum properties of the material Ta2NiSe5, potentially advancing the development of quantum light sources.
Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden, and just as you would use a flashlight to see in the dark, scientists can use light to uncover these properties.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used an advanced optical technique to learn more about a quantum material called Ta2NiSe5 (TNS). Their work was published in the journal Nature Materials.
New Room Temperature Superconductor Throws Hat In The Ring — This Time, It’s Graphite
New research reports magnetic and electrical effects that suggest superconductivity.
Fingerprinting biomolecules with the help of sound
A team of researchers from the Institute for Optoelectronic Systems and Microtechnology at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) has designed a biosensor capable of identifying proteins and peptides in quantities as low as a single monolayer. For that, a surface acoustic wave (SAW), a kind of electrically controlled nano earthquake on a chip, is generated with an integrated transducer to act on a stack of 2D materials coated with the biomolecules to be detected.
As they report in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics in an article titled “Surface–acoustic-wave-driven graphene plasmonic sensor for fingerprinting ultrathin biolayers down to the monolayer limit,” the SAW would ripple the surface of a graphene-based stack in such a way that it confines mid–infrared light to very small volumes, enhancing light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.
In particular, quasiparticles that are part light (photons) and part matter (electrons and lattice vibrations), called surface plasmon-phonon polaritons, are formed at the rippled stack interplaying strongly with the molecules atop.
Beyond the Blink: Probing Quantum Materials at Attosecond Speeds
Researchers have developed a new spectroscopy method to study ultrafast processes in strongly correlated materials, achieving sub-femtosecond resolution.
An international team of researchers from the European XFEL together with colleagues from the Max Born Institute in Berlin, the Universities of Berlin and Hamburg, The University of Tokyo, the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the Dutch Radboud University, Imperial College London, and Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging, have presented new ideas for ultrafast multi-dimensional spectroscopy of strongly correlated solids. This work will be published today (January 24) in Nature Photonics.
Exploring Strongly Correlated Solids
Making a superconductor liquid–solid out of the vacuum with hundred-exatesla-strong magnetic fields
The discovery of superconductivity more than a century ago has significantly changed our world.
The story began in 1911 when the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes observed that the electrical resistance of mercury abruptly dropped to zero when it was cooled to a temperature of about 4 Kelvin (approximately 269°C)—a bit colder than the boiling point of liquid helium.
The practical applications of this remarkable effect were realized much later, in 1986, when a class of high-temperature superconductors was discovered. These high-Tc materials have a critical temperature below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, about −196°C, which reduces the complexity and cost of their operation.
Shining a light on the hidden properties of quantum materials
Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden, and just as you would use a flashlight to see in the dark, scientists can use light to uncover these properties.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used an advanced optical technique to learn more about a quantum material called Ta2NiSe5 (TNS). Their work appears in Nature Materials.
Materials can be perturbed through different external stimuli, often with changes in temperature or pressure; however, because light is the fastest thing in the universe, materials will respond very quickly to optical stimuli, revealing properties that would otherwise remain hidden.
Manipulated hafnia paves the way for next-gen memory devices
Scientists and engineers have been pushing for the past decade to leverage an elusive ferroelectric material called hafnium oxide, or hafnia, to usher in the next generation of computing memory.
Scientists outline new processes for leveraging the ferroelectric features of hafnia with the aim of enhancing high-performance computing.
Simulation observes three distinct phases of superconducting dynamics
In physics, scientists have been fascinated by the mysterious behavior of superconductors—materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. Within these superconducting systems, electrons team up in “Cooper pairs” because they’re attracted to each other due to vibrations in the material called phonons.
As a thermodynamic phase of matter, superconductors typically exist in an equilibrium state. But recently, researchers at JILA became interested in kicking these materials into excited states and exploring the ensuing dynamics. As reported in a new Nature paper, the theory and experiment teams of JILA and NIST Fellows Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson, in collaboration with Prof. Robert Lewis-Swan at the University of Oklahoma, simulated superconductivity under such excited conditions using an atom-cavity system.
Instead of dealing with actual superconducting materials, the scientists harnessed the behavior of strontium atoms, laser-cooled to 10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero and levitated within an optical cavity built out of mirrors.