Category Physics

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...

In this greatly enlarged cross-section of an experimental chip, the bands of black and white reveal alternating layers of hafnium diselenide – an ultrathin semiconductor material – and the hafnium dioxide insulator. The cross-section matches an overlaid color schematic on the right. Credit: Michal Mleczko

The next generation of feature-filled and energy-efficient electronics will require computer chips just a few atoms thick. For all its positive attributes, trusty silicon can’t take us to these ultrathin extremes. Now, electrical engineers at Stanford have identified two semiconductors – hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide – that share or even exceed some of silicon’s desirable traits, starting with the fact that all 3 materials can “rust.”

“It’s a bit like rust, but a very de...