Category Physics

Phase-Defined van der Waals Schottky Junctions with Significantly Enhanced Thermoelectric Properties. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2017; 8 (13): 2887 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01089

A new device being developed by Washington State University physicist Yi Gu could one day turn the heat generated by a wide array of electronics into a usable fuel source. The device is a multicomponent, multilayered composite material called a van der Waals Schottky diode. It converts heat into electricity up to 3X more efficiently than silicon – a semiconductor material widely used in the electronics industry. While still in an early stage of development, the new diode could eventually provide an extra source of power for everything from smartphones to automobiles.

“The ability of our diode to ...

Anti-skyrmions on a racetrack © MPI of Microstructure Physics

Scientists have discovered a new kind of magnetic nano-object in a novel material that could serve as a magnetic bit with cloaking properties to make a magnetic disk drive with no moving parts – a Racetrack Memory – a reality in the near future. Today’s world, rapidly changing because of “big data,” is encapsulated in trillions of tiny magnetic objects — magnetic bits – each of which stores one bit of data in magnetic disk drives.

Most digital data is stored in the cloud as magnetic bits within massive numbers of magnetic disk drives. Over the past several decades these magnetic bits have shrunk by many orders of magnitude, reaching limits where the boundaries of these magnetic regions can have special properties...

Scaffolds in a compound solar cell filled with perovskite after fracture testing. Credit: Dauskardt Lab/Stanford University

Packing tiny solar cells together, like micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, could pave the way to a new generation of advanced photovoltaics. In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material, perovskite from deteriorating when exposed to heat, moisture or mechanical stress. The results are published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science (E&ES).

“Perovskites are promising, low-cost materials that convert sunlight to electricity as efficiently as conventional solar cells made of silicon,” said Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering and senior author of the study...

ComText allows robots to understand contextual commands such as, “Pick up the box I put down.” Credit: Tom Buehler/MIT CSAIL

ComText, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, allows robots to understand contextual commands. Computer scientists have developed an Alexa-like system that allows robots to understand a wide range of commands that require contextual knowledge about objects and their environments. They’ve dubbed the system ‘ComText,’ for ‘commands in context.’ Despite what you might see in movies, today’s robots are still very limited in what they can do. They can be great for many repetitive tasks, but their inability to understand the nuances of human language makes them mostly useless for more complicated requests.

For example, if you put a specif...