Category Physics

Self-healing rubber links permanent covalent bonds (red) with reversible hydrogen bonds (green). Credit: Image courtesy of Peter and Ryan Allen/Harvard SEAS

Potential applications include durable tires, wearable electronics, medical devices. Imagine a tire that could heal after being punctured or a rubber band that never snapped. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new type of rubber that is as tough as natural rubber but can also self-heal.

Self-healing materials aren’t new – researchers at SEAS have developed self-healing hydrogels, which rely on water to incorporate reversible bonds that can promote healing...

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...