Category Physics

Columbia researchers wired a single molecular cluster to gold electrodes to show that it exhibits a quantized and controllable flow of charge at room temperature.
Credit: Bonnie Choi/Columbia University

Researchers are first to reproducibly achieve the current blockade effect using atomically precise molecules at room temperature, a result that could lead to shrinking electrical components + boosting data storage + computing power. Current blockade is the ability to switch a device from the insulating to the conducting state where charge is added and removed one electron at a time.

Bonnie Choi, a graduate student in the Roy group created a single cluster of geometrically ordered atoms with an inorganic core made of just 14 atoms – resulting in a diameter of about 0...

The artist’s rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Credit: David Dung, Universität Bonn

Physicists create optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon for the first time. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new-gen computers. Many thousands of photons can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled. The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates. Prof...

Incoherent Diffractive Imaging via Intensity Correlations of Hard X Rays. Physical Review Letters, 2017; 119 (5) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.053401 Image: Anton Classen

Physicists have developed a new technique for determining molecular structure. Physicists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY, Hamburg) have come up with a method that could significantly improve the quality of X-ray images in comparison to conventional methods. Incoherent diffractive imaging (IDI) could help to image individual atoms in nanocrystals or molecules faster and with a much higher resolution.

For >100 years, X-rays have been used in crystallography to determine the structure of molecules...

A new material developed at Argonne shows promise for batteries that store electricity for the grid. The material consists of carefully structured molecules designed to be particularly electrochemically stable in order to prevent the battery from losing energy to unwanted reactions.
Credit: Robert Horn, Argonne National Laboratory

A new material shows promise for batteries that store electricity for the grid. The material, created by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, consists of carefully structured molecules designed to be particularly electrochemically stable in order to prevent the battery from losing energy to unwanted reactions...