Category Physics

This is an artistic rendering of a carbonized fungal biomass-manganese oxide mineral composite (MycMnOx/C) can be applied as a novel electrochemical material in energy storage devices Credit: Qianwei Li and Geoffrey Michael Gadd

A red bread mold could be the key to producing more sustainable electrochemical materials for use in rechargeable batteries. The researchers show for the first time that the fungus Neurospora crassa can transform manganese into a mineral composite with favorable electrochemical properties.

“We have made electrochemically active materials using a fungal manganese biomineralization process,” says Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee in Scotland...

This diagram illustrates the effect of helium ions on the mechanical and electrical properties of the layered ferroelectric: a.) Disappearance domains in the exposed area; as the mound forms yellow regions (ferroelectricity) gradually disappear; b.) Mechanical properties of the material; warmer colors indicate hard areas, cool colors indicate soft areas; c.) Conductivity enhancement; warmer colors show insulating areas, cooler colors show more conductive areas. Credit: ORNL

2D electronic devices could inch closer to their ultimate promise of low power, high efficiency and mechanical flexibility with a processing technique developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory...

Image of a nonlinear Bessel beam. Credit: Miguel Ángel Porras

Researchers have revealed the underlying order of chaos by observing very long and intense laser light beams and ionized matter in the so-called “light filaments”. Observed for first time in solids in 1964 and in the air in 1994, the “light filamentation” phenomenon has been recently explained by researchers from the Complex Systems Group (GSC), Madrid. Thanks to the new understanding of the “light filamentation” phenomenon from the approach of complex systems and the chaos theory, new research projects will be boosted to control such “light filaments” and to improve their applications.

One of the goals of the Science of Complexity is to extract patterns of behavior where only disorder is observed, no matter if the object o...

A new strategy helps quantum bits stay on task. Credit: Image courtesy of Florida State University

Development of quantum computers may be expedited by collaboration between physicists and chemists. Quantum computer power will dwarf that of today’s machines, with huge implications for cryptography, computational chemistry and other fields. While qubits can take many different forms, the MagLab team worked with carefully designed tungsten oxide molecules that contained a single magnetic holmium ion. The magnetic electrons associated with each holmium ion circulate either clockwise or counterclockwise around the axis of the molecule. These spin states are analogous to the “0s” and “1s” of computer bits...