Category Physics

A material known as cubic boron arsenide has two major advantages over silicon, research shows. It provides high mobility to both electrons and holes, and it has excellent thermal conductivity. It is, the researchers say, the best semiconductor material ever found.

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and in its pure form the material has become the foundation of much of modern technology, from solar cells to computer chips. But silicon’s properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal.

For one thing, although silicon lets electrons whizz through its structure easily, it is much less accommodating...

Researchers have designed a fuel production system that uses water, carbon dioxide (CO2), and sunlight to produce aviation fuel. They have implemented the system in the field, and the design, publishing July 20 in the journal Joule, could help the aviation industry become carbon neutral.

“We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system,” says Aldo Steinfeld (@solarfuels), ...

A general theory describing how life depends on temperature has been lacking – until now. In a paper pubished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Jose Ignacio Arroyo, a Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, introduce a simple framework that rigorously predicts how temperature affects living things, at all scales.

“It is very fundamental,” says SFI External Professor Pablo Marquet, an ecologist at the Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile, in Santiago. Marquet, Arroyo’s Ph.D. thesis advisor, also worked on the model. “You can apply this to pretty much every process that is affected by temperature. We hope it will be a landmark contribution.”

Marquet notes that such a theory could help researchers make accurate predictions in a range of a...

In an important step toward bringing transparent solar cells to home windows, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a way to manufacture their highly efficient and semitransparent solar cells.

“In principle, we can now scale semitransparent organic solar cells to two meters by two meters, which brings our windows much closer to reality,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and corresponding author of a study published in Joule.