From carbon nanotubes to multi-layered graphene, we explore the revolutionary materials that could turn space elevators from sci-fi dreams into real-world infrastructure. Discover how these supermaterials might let us weave ribbons to the stars.
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/ discord Credits: Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond… Episode 741; July 24, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Edited by: Adrian Nixon Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator Chris Zabriskie, “Unfoldment, Revealment”, “A New Day in a New Sector” Aerium, “Deijocht” Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Billions and Billions” Chapters 0:00 Intro 0:09 The Vision of the Space Elevator 2:46 The Rope That Reaches the Sky 9:08 Manufacturing the Megastructure 12:58 Tether Design and Variants 19:57 PIA 21:52 Defects and Composites: Strength in Layers 22:48 Power and Payload 25:20 Safety, Scaling, and the Road Ahead.
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Credits:
Materials For Space Elevators — From Carbon Nanotubes To Graphene And Beyond…
Episode 741; July 24, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by:
Adrian Nixon.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Chris Zabriskie, \
A research group led by Assistant Professor Takafumi Tomita and Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, has developed a new microscopy technique called the Atom Camera, which uses a single ultracold atom at near absolute zero temperature trapped in an optical tweezer as a camera to visualize the intensity and polarization distributions of light at the nanometer (one-millionth of a millimeter) scale.
In this study, a single atom trapped by optical tweezer was successfully utilized as a scanning probe for imaging the fine structures of intensity and polarization distributions of light patterns with a spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit of conventional optical microscopes. The results are published in Nature Communications.
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Using finely tuned nanoscale building blocks, researchers from Brown University and the University of Michigan College of Engineering have stabilized a fleeting structural phase of matter that had been predicted theoretically but never before stabilized in a physical material.
The new nanoparticle superlattice, described in the journal Science, freezes an elusive intermediate state between two of nature’s most common crystal metallic arrangements. Beyond describing new details about how this transition works, the new structure exhibits extraordinary optical properties that could be useful in quantum computing or other quantum information systems.
More broadly, the work provides a new recipe for using custom-shaped nanoparticles to engineer entirely new classes of materials with tailored properties.
An extremely fast microscopy method to research the interaction of light and matter makes it possible to study optical processes on very short timescales. To this end, a German–Italian research team is combining holographic imaging with ultrafast spectroscopy in an innovative way. In this manner, even extremely short-lived electronic and magnetic phenomena—which play a major role in the development and application of novel energy materials—can be observed.
The research was conducted as part of an international collaboration between scientists from the Institute for Physical Chemistry at Heidelberg University, the Polytechnic University of Milan, and the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies in Milan (Italy). The findings are published in the journal Nature Photonics.
At the heart of the research is a pump-probe microscope, which is used to conduct so-called excitation and detection experiments. In this process, the material under investigation is first excited by a short light pulse, while a second pulse records the time-dependent response. By comparing measurements taken with the excitation on and off, these processes can be accurately reconstructed.
Physicists from Emory University have led work to develop a microscopic, nonlinear light source that can be switched on, off or tuned to a particular intensity by an electrical “knob.” The paper is published in the journal Optica, and could aid in the design of smaller, more flexible technologies for communications, sensing and quantum computing.
The new method focuses on a type of nonlinear optics known as second harmonic generation (SHG), where two photons of the same frequency interact with a material and combine into a single photon with twice the frequency.
“Nobody had previously shown that you can tune second harmonic generation with an electric knob in such a small device,” says Hayk Harutyunyan, senior author of the paper and Emory professor of physics.
Heat behaves in predictable ways: a hot cup of coffee cools, a laptop warms your hands, the sun heats Earth. But at scales thousands of times smaller than a human hair, those rules begin to break down, and scientists are learning how to take advantage of that.
A new study, published in Nature from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Stanford University and Purdue University, shows that heat can be manipulated far more powerfully than previously demonstrated using carefully engineered metamaterials. The work offers one of the clearest experimental confirmations yet that heat transfer can be actively designed and enhanced.
At the core of the discovery is a phenomenon called near-field radiative heat transfer. When two objects are brought extremely close together—just a few hundred nanometers apart—heat doesn’t simply radiate away in the usual sense. Instead, it can tunnel across the gap through electromagnetic waves, dramatically increasing how much energy flows between them.
Researchers have created a new theoretical framework that shows how memory-preserving “memtransistors” could overcome the intrinsic limits in efficiency faced by conventional semiconductor transistors, imposed by the laws of thermodynamics.
Led by Victor Lopez-Richard at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, in collaboration with the University of Wurzburg, in Germany, and the University of Richmond, U.S., the researchers showed that further improvements to transistor switching efficiency could be reached simply by harnessing memory effects that are already present in many nanoscale devices. The research has been published in Physical Review Applied.