Category Physics

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...

The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

The camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet near the poles where the magnetic field lines dip down toward the ground...

The magnetic structure of a skyrmion is symmetrical around its core; arrows indicate the direction of spin. Credit: Ill./©: Benjamin Krüger

JGU and MIT joint teams have for the first time achieved targeted shifting of individual skyrmions at room temperature using electrical impulses. The idea is that electronic storage units (bits) will not be stored on rotating hard disks as is currently standard practice but on a nanowire in the form of magnetic vortex structures, ie skyrmions, using a process similar to that of a shift register. The magnetic skyrmion bits would be rapidly accessible, while storage density would be high and there would be improved energy efficiency.

Magnetic skyrmions are special spin configurations that can occur in materials especially in thin layer structures when ...