Category Physics

Single crystals of the multiferroic material bismuth-iron-oxide. The bismuth atoms (blue) form a cubic lattice with oxygen atoms (yellow) at each face of the cube and an iron atom (gray) near the center. The somewhat off-center iron interacts with the oxygen to form an electric dipole (P), which is coupled to the magnetic spins of the atoms (M) so that flipping the dipole with an electric field (E) also flips the magnetic moment. The collective magnetic spins of the atoms in the material encode the binary bits 0 and 1, and allow for information storage and logic operations.
Credit: Ramamoorthy Ramesh lab, UC Berkeley

Multiferroics are promising candidates for new type of memory and logic circuits. Researchers from Intel Corp...

A new water-splitting catalyst material produce hydrogen cheaply without fossil fuels
CREDIT
QUT: Ummul Sultana

Chemistry researchers have discovered cheaper and more efficient materials for producing hydrogen for the storage of renewable energy that could replace current water-splitting catalysts. “In principle, hydrogen offers a way to store clean energy at a scale that is required to make the rollout of large-scale solar and wind farms as well as the export of green energy viable.

“However, current methods that use carbon sources to produce hydrogen emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that mitigates the benefits of using renewable energy from the sun and wind...

Chang-Beom Eom, right, and Mark Rzchowski inspect a materials growth chamber. The researchers have made a new material that can be switched from electrical conductor to insulator. Credit: UW-Madison photo by Sam Million-Weaver

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have made a material that can transition from an electricity-transmitting metal to a nonconducting insulating material without changing its atomic structure. “This is quite an exciting discovery,” says Chang-Beom Eom, professor of materials science and engineering. “We’ve found a new method of electronic switching.”

The new material could lay the groundwork for ultrafast electronic devices. Metals like copper or silver conduct electricity, whereas insulators like rubber or glass do not allow current to flow...

The authors of the paper, from left to right: Ph.D. student Mark R. Hogg; Professor Michelle Simmons; Post Doc Matthew G. House; Ph.D. student Prasanna Pakkiam; Post Doc Andrey Timofeev.
Credit: UNSW Sydney

Professor Michelle Simmons’ team at UNSW Sydney has demonstrated a compact sensor for accessing information stored in the electrons of individual atoms – a breakthrough that brings us one step closer to scalable quantum computing in silicon. The research, conducted within the Simmons group at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) with PhD student Prasanna Pakkiam as lead author, was published today in the journal Physical Review X (PRX).

Quantum bits (or qubits) made from electrons hosted on single atoms in semiconductors is a promising pla...