Category Physics

Engineered Defects in Crystalline Material Boosts Electrical Performance

Xiaoli Tan and a team of campus collaborators used this transmission electron microscope at the Ames Laboratory’s Sensitive Instrument Facility to study the effects of engineering defects into certain materials. Larger photoPhoto by Christopher Gannon.

Researchers have discovered that engineering one-dimensional line defects into certain materials can increase their electrical performance. Materials engineers don’t like to see line defects in functional materials.

The structural flaws along a one-dimensional line of atoms generally degrades performance of electrical materials. So, as a research paper published today by the journal Science reports, these linear defects, or dislocations, “are usually avoided at all costs.”

But sometimes, a team of researchers from Europe, Iowa St...

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AI with Swarm Intelligence

Prof. Joachim Schultze, Director of Systems Medicine at DZNE. Source: DZNE / Frommann

A novel technology for cooperative analysis of big data. Researchers have used ‘swarm learning’ – a novel, artificial intelligence technology – to detect blood cancer, lung diseases and COVID-19 in data stored in a decentralized fashion.

Communities benefit from sharing knowledge and experience among their members. This approach has advantage over conventional methods since it inherently provides privacy preservation technologies, which facilitates cross-site analysis of scientific data. Swarm learning could thus significantly promote and accelerate collaboration and information exchange in research, especially in the field of medicine...

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Holograms increase Solar Energy Yield

A holographic light collector separates the colors of sunlight and directs them to the solar cells. Credit: R.K. Kostuk, University of Arizona

Researchers recently developed an innovative technique to capture the unused solar energy that illuminates a solar panel. They created special holograms that can be easily inserted into the solar panel package. This method can increase the amount of solar energy converted by the solar panel over the course of a year by about five percent.

The energy available from sunlight is 10,000 times more than what is needed to supply the world’s energy demands. Sunlight has two main properties that are useful in the design of renewable energy systems. The first is the amount power falling on a fixed area, like the ground or a person’s roof...

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Generating Electricity from Heat using the Spin Seebeck Device

Thermoelectric (TE) conversion offers a carbon-free power generation from geothermal, waste, body or solar heat, and shows promise to be the next-generation energy conversion technology. At the core of such TE conversion, there lies an all solid-state thermoelectric device which enables energy conversion without the emission of noise, vibrations, or pollutants. To this, a POSTECH research team proposed a way to design the next-generation thermoelectric device that exhibits remarkably simple manufacturing process and structure compared to the conventional ones, while displaying improved energy conversion efficiency using the spin Seebeck effect (SSE).

A POSTECH joint research team — led by Professor Hyungyu Jin and Ph.D...

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