Category Physics

Masdar Institute postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Jin You Lu, characterizes the nanoporous solar absorber with UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy. Credit: Tahra Al Hammadi, Masdar Institute News

“Our research team has developed a simple and cost-effective fabrication technique to create solar absorbers that can harness a greater share of the solar spectrum, thus increasing their efficiencies, while also maintaining low emission levels,” said Masdar Institute’s Dr. TieJun Zhang, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

Dr. Nicholas X...

Plexcitons travel for 20,000 nanometers, a length which is on the order of the width of human hair. Graphic by Joel Yuen-Zhou

Scientists at UC SD, MIT and HarvardU have engineered “topological plexcitons,” energy-carrying particles that could help make possible the design of new kinds of solar cells and miniaturized optical circuitry. Within the Lilliputian world of solid state physics, light and matter interact in strange ways, exchanging energy back and forth between them.

“When light and matter interact, they exchange energy,” explained Assistant/Prof. Joel Yuen-Zhou. “Energy can flow back and forth between light in a metal (so called plasmon) and light in a molecule (so called exciton)...

An ORNL-led research team used neutrons (depicted as spheres) to determine the magnetic structure (seen as blue arrows) of an osmium-based material. X-rays (seen as purple waves) revealed the presence of a strong spin orbit effect (illustrated in red). Credit: ORNL/Jill Hemman

An elusive massless particle could exist in a magnetic crystal structure, revealed by neutron and X-ray research. The team studied a material containing the dense element osmium and documented 2 conditions required for the presence of Weyl fermions -predicted in 1929 and observed experimentally in 2015. Researchers are looking for other materials that could host them to harness their unique properties in spintronics and advanced computing applications such as quantum computers.

“Once you have a material that hosts th...

Conformal titanium nitride in a porous silicon matrix: A nanomaterial for in-chip supercapacitors

Efficient nanomaterial-based integrated energy. VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland developed an extremely efficient small-size energy storage, a micro-supercapacitor, which can be integrated directly inside a silicon microcircuit chip. The high energy and power density of the miniaturized energy storage relies on the new hybrid nanomaterial developed recently at VTT. This technology opens new possibilities for integrated mobile devices and paves the way for zero-power autonomous devices required for the future Internet of Things (IoT).

Supercapacitors resemble electrochemical batteries...