Category Physics

Self-Powered Wearable Tech

For emerging wearable tech to advance, it needs improved power sources. Now researchers from Michigan State University have provided a potential solution via crumpled carbon nanotube forests, or CNT forests.
Credit: Courtesy of MSU

For emerging wearable tech to advance, it needs improved power sources. Now researchers from Michigan State University have provided a potential solution via crumpled carbon nanotube forests, or CNT forests.

Changyong Cao, director of MSU’s Soft Machines and Electronics Laboratory, led a team of scientists in creating highly stretchable supercapacitors for powering wearable electronics...

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Record Solar Hydrogen production with concentrated Sunlight

Figure 2

Illustration of the integrated PEC device.

Researchers have created a smart device capable of producing large amounts of clean hydrogen. By concentrating sunlight, their device uses a smaller amount of the rare, costly materials that are required to produce hydrogen, yet it still maintains a high solar-to-fuel efficiency. Their research has been taken to the next scale with a pilot facility installed on the EPFL campus.

Scientists at EPFL’s Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering (LRESE) came up with the idea of concentrating solar irradiation to produce a larger amount of hydrogen over a given area at a lower cost...

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Surprising Quantum effect in Hard Disk Drive material


Researchers at Argonne have discovered a way to control the direction of electron spin in a cobalt-iron alloy, influencing its magnetic properties. The result could have implications for more powerful and energy-efficient materials for information storage.
Credit: Argonne National Laboratory

Scientists have further explored a new effect that enhances their ability to control the direction of electron spin in certain materials. Their discovery may lead to more powerful and energy-efficient materials for information storage.

Sometimes scientific discoveries can be found along well-trodden paths. That proved the case for a cobalt-iron alloy material commonly found in hard disk drives. As reported in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, researchers from the U.S...

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Quantum Gas turns Supersolid

Several tens of thousands of particles spontaneously organize in a self-determined crystalline structure while sharing the same macroscopic wavefunction — hallmarks of supersolidity.
Credit: Uni Innsbruck

Researchers report on the observation of supersolid behavior in dipolar quantum gases of erbium and dysprosium. In the dysprosium gas these properties are unprecedentedly long-lived. This sets the stage for future investigations into the nature of this exotic phase of matter.

Supersolidity is a paradoxical state where the matter is both crystallized and superfluid. Predicted 50 years ago, such a counter-intuitive phase, featuring rather antithetic properties, has been long searched in superfluid helium...

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