Hydrogel boosts motor function:
Hydrogel made with hyaluronic acid-graft-dopamine and a designer peptide improved motor function in animals after spinal cord injury.
One of the challenges of cramming smarter and more powerful electronics into ever-shrinking devices is developing the tools and techniques to analyze the materials that make them up with increasingly intimate precision.
Physicists at Michigan State University have taken a long-awaited step on that front with an approach that combines high-resolution microscopy with ultrafast lasers.
The technique, described in the journal Nature Photonics (“Atomic-scale terahertz time-domain spectroscopy”), enables researchers to spot misfit atoms in semiconductors with unparalleled precision. Semiconductor physics labels these atoms as “defects,” which sounds negative, but they’re usually added to materials on purpose and are critically important to the performance of semiconductors in today’s — and tomorrow’s — devices.
Like a scene from the movies, a team of researchers from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has developed new ways to freely produce and customize the food that we eat.
Their findings have been published in the journal Future Foods as “Multi-material direct ink writing 3D food printing using multi-channel nozzle.”
Three-dimensional (3D) printing using food ingredients is currently the favored approach to shaping foods with unique structures, textures, and nutritional compositions.
A new theory has finally deciphered the physical mechanisms of fracture in soft materials. This discovery could soon lead to new, defect-free materials that are more resistant and durable as well as environmentally friendly. The article “Elastic instability behind brittle fracture” was recently published by Physical Review Letters.
“We have revealed that fracture propagates from the free surface of the material, starting from an elastic instability that breaks the symmetry of the object. Then, the rupture drastically extends with an intricate network of cracks spreading like a turbulence phenomenon similar to what we observe in fluids, like during vortex formation,” explains Pasquale Ciarletta from the MOX Laboratory, Department of Mathematics at Politecnico di Milano.
This discovery stimulates significant applications in various technological sectors. For instance, in the production of micro and nano devices, where materials need to be extremely resistant and defect-free.
A groundbreaking study has demonstrated the use of liquid crystals for efficient and tunable spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), expanding the potential of quantum light sources beyond traditional solid materials.
Spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), a key method for generating entangled photons used in quantum physics and technology, has traditionally been restricted to solid materials. However, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) and the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, have recently achieved a breakthrough by demonstrating SPDC in a liquid crystal for the first time. Their findings, published in Nature, pave the way for the development of a new generation of quantum sources that are both efficient and tunable by electric fields.
The splitting of a single photon in two is one of the most useful tools in quantum photonics. It can create entangled photon pairs, single photons, squeezed light, and even more complicated states of light which are essential for optical quantum technologies. This process is known as spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC).
To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four-thousandths of a second.
To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.
With that in mind, scientists have unveiled a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.
An international collaborative research team has developed an image recognition technology that can accurately determine the elemental composition and the number of charge and discharge cycles of a battery by examining only its surface morphology using AI learning.
Professor Seungbum Hong from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in collaboration with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and Drexel University in the United States, has developed a method to predict the major elemental composition and charge-discharge state of NCM cathode materials with 99.6% accuracy using convolutional neural networks (CNN).
The paper is published in the journal npj Computational Materials.
Researchers have successfully controlled the quantum mechanical properties of Andreev bound states in bilayer graphene-based Josephson junctions using gate voltage. Their research is published in Physical Review Letters. The research team includes Professors Gil-Ho Lee and Gil Young Cho from the Department of Physics at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea in collaboration with Dr. Kenji Watanabe and Dr. Takashi Taniguchi from National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan.
Superconductors are materials that exhibit zero electrical resistance under specific conditions such as extremely low temperatures or high pressures. When a very thin normal conductor is placed between two superconductors, a supercurrent flows through the normal conductor due to the proximity effect where superconductivity extends into the normal conductor. This device is known as a Josephson junction.
Within the normal conductor, new quantum states called Andreev bound states are formed, which are crucial for mediating the supercurrent flow.
The propagation of charged particles in a medium at a speed exceeding the phase speed of light in the medium (this speed also called superluminal) leads to the generation of radiation. The diagram of generated radiation during this process has a conical structure. This effect, called the Cherenkov effect, has many fundamental and applied applications, and its explanation was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1958.
The oblique incidence of light on the interface between two media is a similar phenomenon; in this case, a wave of secondary radiation sources is formed along the interface, which propagates at a speed exceeding the phase speed of light.
The refraction and reflection of light from an interface is the result of the addition of the amplitudes of waves from all sources formed during light incidence. If one considers the interface with photo emissive material—the cathode, on which light is incident obliquely and causes of electron emission—then an electron density wave will form along the cathode surface at superluminal speed.
