Category Physics

Storing heat as electricity. Credit: Image courtesy of Linköping Universitet

A supercondenser has been developed that can be charged by the sun. It contains no expensive or hazardous materials, has patents pending, and it should be fully possible to manufacture it on an industrial scale. In the future we could have a completely new type of energy storage, charged by heat energy – eg during the day when the sun shines, or by waste heat from an industrial process. The heat is converted to electricity, which can be stored until it is needed.

Simply put, a supercondenser is energy storage: a type of battery that consists of an electrolyte of ions between two electrodes. The charge is stored next to the electrodes, most often in carbon nanotubes...

Three-dimensional image using scanning tunneling electron microscopy of electrons on the surface of a Weyl semi-metal, a kind of crystal with unusual conducting and insulating properties. Credit: Yazdani et al., Princeton University.

Princeton Uni researchers have observed a bizarre behavior in a strange new topological crystal material that could hold the key for faster electronics. Unlike most materials in which electrons travel on the surface, in these new materials the electrons sink into the depths of the crystal through special conductive channels. “It is like these electrons go down a rabbit hole and show up on the opposite surface,” said Prof. Ali Yazdani, . “You don’t find anything else like this in other materials.”

Yazdani and his colleagues discovered the odd behavior while stu...

Graduate students Junyi Wu and Curtis Wang and professor Milton Feng found that light stimulates switching speed in the transistor laser, a device they hope will usher in the next generation of high-speed data transmission. Credit: Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Light and electrons interact in a complex dance within fiber optic devices. A new study by University of Illinois engineers found that in the transistor laser, a device for next-generation high-speed computing, the light and electrons spur one another on to faster switching speeds than any devices available.

As big data become bigger and cloud computing becomes more commonplace, the infrastructure for transferring the ever-increasing amounts of data needs to speed up...

Squeezing iron-containing ferrocene (not to scale) in the pores of the metal-organic framework known as MIL-101 lets ferrocene’s iron snag oxygen from passing air. Credit: PNNL

Inexpensive materials called MOFs pull gases out of air or other mixed gas streams, but fail to do so with oxygen. Now, a team has overcome this limitation by creating a composite of a MOF and a helper molecule in which the 2 work in concert to separate oxygen from other gases simply and cheaply. The results might help with a wide variety of applications, including making pure oxygen for fuel cells, using that oxygen in a fuel cell, removing oxygen in food packaging, making oxygen sensors, or for other industrial processes...