Category Physics

A new MIT plane is propelled via ionic wind. Batteries in the fuselage (tan compartment in front of plane) supply voltage to electrodes (blue/white horizontal lines) strung along the length of the plane, generating a wind of ions that propels the plane forward.
Credit: Christine Y. He

The silent, lightweight aircraft doesn’t depend on fossil fuels or batteries. Engineers have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts. Instead of propellers or turbines, the light aircraft is powered by an ‘ionic wind’ – a silent but mighty flow of ions that is produced aboard the plane, and that generates enough thrust to propel the plane over a sustained, steady flight.

Since the first airplane took flight over 100 years ago, virtually every aircraft in the sky has flown with the help of mov...

This is a schematic of the new optical waveguide device showing the input and output gratings and silicon waveguide connections.
Credit: Natasha Litchinitser, Duke University

New photonic crystal waveguide based on topological insulators paves the way to build futuristic light-based computers. Engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a device that can direct photons of light around sharp corners with virtually no losses due to backscattering, a key property that will be needed if electronics are ever to be replaced with light-based devices.

The result was achieved with photonic crystals built on the concept of topological insulators, which won its discoverers a Nobel Prize in 2016...

Led by scientists at Rice University, researchers have created an epoxy-graphene foam compound that is tough and conductive without adding significant weight. The material is suitable for applications like electromagnetic shielding.
Credit: Rouzbeh Shahsavari Group/Rice University

Scientists combine graphene foam, epoxy into tough, conductive composite but as light as pure epoxy. Rice University scientists have built a better epoxy for electronic applications. Epoxy combined with “ultrastiff” graphene foam invented in the Rice lab of chemist James Tour is substantially tougher than pure epoxy and far more conductive than other epoxy composites while retaining the material’s low density...

Illustration shows how hydrogen ions (red dots), controlled by an electric voltage, migrate through an intermediate material to change the magnetic properties of an adjacent magnetic layer(shown in green).
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News

A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now.

Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that they can control the magnetic properties of a thin-film material simply by applying a small voltage...