Lifeboat Foundation

In 2018, a discovery in materials science sent shock waves throughout the community. A team showed that stacking two layers of graphene at a precise magic angle turned it into a superconductor, says Ritesh Agarwal of the University of Pennsylvania. This sparked the field of twistronics, revealing that twisting layered materials could unlock extraordinary material properties.

Building on this concept, Agarwal, Penn theoretical physicist Eugene Mele, and collaborators have taken twistronics into new territory. In a study published in Nature (“Opto-twistronic Hall effect in a three-dimensional spiral lattice”), they investigated spirally stacked tungsten disulfide (WS 2) crystals and discovered that, by twisting these layers, light could be used to manipulate electrons. The result is analogous to the Coriolis force, which curves the paths of objects in a rotating frame, like how wind and ocean currents behave on Earth.

“What we discovered is that by simply twisting the material, we could control how electrons move,” says Agarwal, Srinivasa Ramanujan Distinguished Scholar in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. This phenomenon was particularly evident when the team shined circularly polarized light on WS 2 spirals, causing electrons to deflect in different directions based on the material’s internal twist.

New software simulates complex wave scattering for metamaterial design. Could invisibility cloaks become a reality? New research brings this science fiction concept a step closer, with a breakthrough software package that simulates how waves interact with complex materials.

A new software package developed by researchers at Macquarie University can accurately model the way waves — sound, water or light — are scattered when they meet complex configurations of particles.

This will vastly improve the ability to rapidly design metamaterials — exciting artificial materials used to amplify, block or deflect waves.

A groundbreaking study by researchers from the University of Toronto, has revealed a phenomenon where photons were seen exiting a material before they entered it. This observation, marking the first evidence of negative time, was made during an experiment involving atomic excitation. The team has been investigating this light-matter interaction for seven years.

In 2018, a discovery in materials science sent shock waves throughout the community. A team showed that stacking two layers of graphene—a honeycomb-like layer of carbon extracted from graphite—at a precise “magic angle” turned it into a superconductor, says Ritesh Agarwal of the University of Pennsylvania.

A team of engineers and materials scientists at LG Chem, Korea’s largest chemical company, has developed a material that they claim could greatly reduce the risk of thermal runaway and resulting fires in batteries. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how they developed the material and how well it has worked during testing.

Over the past several years, consumers have witnessed or have heard about batteries in smartphones or cars catching on fire. These fires, it has been found, result from thermal runaway, which is where the anode and cathode inside a battery come too close together, or worse, actually touch.

The result is a short, which generates heat, and results soon thereafter in a fire. In this new effort, the team at LG has developed a thin material that, when placed between the cathode and collector, prevents thermal runaway.

JUST PUBLISHED: A Janus Adhesive Hydrogel with Integrated Attack and Defense for Bacteria Killing and Antifouling.

For the last three years,…

A UWE Bristol researcher hopes to revolutionise the jewellery industry and its supply chains with the creation of unique gemstone and jewellery designs with ground-breaking properties — including the world’s first single stone glow-in-the-dark manmade crystal.

For the last three years, award-winning jewellery designer Sofie Boons, who’s a Crafts Council Research Fellow at the university’s Centre for Print Research (CFPR), has been undertaking tests on the viability, limitations and use of innovative and experimentally grown crystals in the production of contemporary jewellery.

Continue reading “Glow in the dark gemstones show the jewellery industry that laboratory-grown crystals can shine bright” »

Yet despite the attraction of OAM monopoles for orbitronics, until this latest study, they have remained a theoretical dream.

Hedgehogs hide between theory and experiment.

To observe them experimentally, hope has lain with a technique known as Circular Dichroism in Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy, or CD-ARPES, using circularly polarised X-rays from a synchrotron light source. Yet a gap between theory and experiment has in the past hindered researchers from interpreting the data. “Researchers may have had the data, but the evidence for OAM monopoles was buried in it,” says Schüler.

A practical superconductor would transform the efficiency of electronics. After decades of hunting, several key breakthroughs are inching us very close to this coveted prize.

By Jon Cartwright