Category Physics

Stanford engineers created arrays of silicon nanocones to trap sunlight and improve the performance of solar cells made of bismuth vanadate (1μm=1,000 nanometers). Credit: Wei Chen and Yongcai Qiu, Stanford

A Stanford University lab has developed new technologies to tackle 2 of the world’s large energy challenges: clean fuel for transportation and grid-scale energy storage. Although H-cars are emission-free, making hydrogen fuel, however, is not emission free: today, making most H fuel involves natural gas in a process releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.

To address the problem, Cui and his colleagues have focused on photovoltaic water splitting which consists of a solar-powered electrode immersed in water...

By splitting programs across a large number of processor cores, the KiloCore chip designed at UC Davis can run at high clock speeds with high energy efficiency. Credit: Andy Fell/UC Davis

A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

“To the best of our knowledge, it is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university,” said Prof. Bevan Baas. While other multiple-processor chips have been created, none exceed about 300 processors...

By doping thermoelectric materials with minute amounts of sulfur, researchers have found a new approach to materials for solid-state heating and cooling, and waste energy recapture. Credit: Image courtesy of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)

By doping a thermoelectric material with minute amounts of sulfur, a team has found a new path to large improvements in the efficiency of materials for solid-state heating and cooling and waste energy recapture...

With four moving rows of magnets, the Delta undulator can create circularly polarized, or spiraling, light. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

A new device at the Dept of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab allows researchers to explore the properties and dynamics of molecules with circularly polarized, or spiraling, light. The use of polarized light is important in the study of many molecules and processes that affect our everyday lives...