Category Physics

This is the device compared to a US dollar coin.
Credit: Zhenlong Huang

By stacking and connecting layers of stretchable circuits on top of one another, engineers have developed an approach to build soft, pliable “3D stretchable electronics” that can pack a lot of functions while staying thin and small in size. The work is published in the Aug. 13 issue of Nature Electronics.

As a proof of concept, a team led by the University of California San Diego has built a stretchable electronic patch that can be worn on the skin like a bandage and used to wirelessly monitor a variety of physical and electrical signals, from respiration, to body motion, to temperature, to eye movement, to heart and brain activity. The device, which is as small and thick as a U.S...

Qingkun Liu, a postdoctoral research associate at CU Boulder, holds up samples of a new gel that could improve the energy efficiency of windows across the United States.
Credit: CU Boulder

A new, super-insulating gel developed by researchers at CU Boulder could dramatically increase the energy efficiency of skyscrapers and other buildings, and might one day help scientists build greenhouse-like habitats for colonists on Mars. The “aerogel,” which looks like a flattened plastic contact lens, is so resistant to heat that you could put a strip of it on your hand and a fire on top without feeling a thing. But unlike similar products on the market, the material is mostly transparent.

“Transparency is an enabling feature because you can use this gel in windows, and you could use it in extraterres...

The open problem was what controlled the velocity of the electron liquid (shown as a wavy waterfront). The findings show that it is the frozen antiferromagnetism on the honeycomb lattice that sets this velocity by slowing it down as the two interact.
Credit: Yale-NUS College

A new discovery explains what happens during the phase transition in Dirac materials, paving the way for engineering advanced electronics that perform significantly faster. Yale-NUS Associate Professor of Science (Physics) Shaffique Adam is the lead author for a recent work that describes a model for electron interaction in Dirac materials, a class of materials that includes graphene and topological insulators, solving a 65-year-old open theoretical problem in the process...

When two monolayers of WTe2 are stacked into a bilayer, a spontaneous electrical polarization appears, one layer becoming positively charged and the other negatively charged. This polarization can be flipped by applying an electric field.
Credit: Joshua Kahn

Researchers report that the 2D form of tungsten ditelluride can undergo ‘ferroelectric switching.’ Materials with ferroelectric properties can have applications in memory storage, capacitors, RFID card technologies and even medical sensors – and tungsten ditelluride is the first exfoliated 2D material known to undergo ferroelectric switching.

2D materials can be prepared in crystalline sheets as thin as a single monolayer, only one or a few atoms thick...