Category Physics

A piece of fabric was woven with special strands of material that harvest electricity from the sun and motion. Credit: Georgia Tech

Georgia Institute of Tech researchers have developed a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from both sunshine and motion. Combining two types of electricity generation into one textile paves the way for developing garments that could provide their own source of energy to power devices such as smart phones or GPS. “This hybrid power textile presents a novel solution to charging devices in the field from something as simple as the wind blowing on a sunny day,” said Prof. Zhong Lin Wang.

To make the fabric, Wang’s team used a commercial textile machine to weave together solar cells constructed from lightweight polymer fibers with fiber-based triboelectr...

Network of conducting and insulating rivers as seen in a metal-oxide in the middle of a phase transition. Credit: A.S. Mueller

Physicists have for the first time succeeded in directly visualising on small scales how a material abruptly changes its state from conducting to insulating at low temperatures. Researchers provide evidence for a 60-year-old theory that explains this phenomenon and pave the way for more energy efficient technologies. Materials that conduct electricity at high temperature but are insulating at lower temperatures have been known for decades. However, until recently it was not possible to directly measure how such phase transitions proceed on small length scales...

Spatiotemporal optical vortices, or STOVs (thin, gray ringlike objects), are newly described three-dimensional light structures that strongly resemble smoke rings. Unlike other laser vortices, STOVs are time dynamic, which means that they travel along with the central laser pulse. Compared to other laser vortices, STOVs could prove more broadly useful for engineering applications. Credit: Howard Milchberg

3-D ring structures made by high-intensity lasers could aid the design of powerful microscopes and more efficient telecommunication lines...

To direct-write the logo of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists started with a gray-scale image. They used the electron beam of an aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope to induce palladium from a solution to deposit as nanocrystals. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) has been harnessed for the first time to directly write tiny patterns in metallic “ink,” forming features in liquid that are finer than half the width of a human hair. The automated process is controlled by weaving a STEM instrument’s electron beam through a liquid-filled cell to spur deposition of metal onto a silicon microchip...