Category Physics

A team of researchers from the University of Toronto has created a triple-junction perovskite solar cell with record efficiency by overcoming a key limitation of previous designs.

The prototype represents a significant advance in the development of low-cost alternatives to silicon-based solar cells, which are the current industry standard.

“In addition to lower manufacturing cost, perovskites offer us the ability to stack multiple layers of light-absorbing materials on top of each other, and even on top of traditional silicon cells,” says Professor Ted Sargent, who recently joined the departme...

Researchers have identified a new circuit element known as a meminductor. Dr. H. Rusty Harris, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has identified a new circuit element known as a meminductor.

A circuit element is an electrical component used to help direct and control the flow of electricity through an electrical circuit. The classical three are known as the resistor, capacitor and inductor. Two additional circuit elements, the memristor and the memcapacitor, were only discovered in the past 15 years...

Researchers have developed a new chip-sized microwave photonic filter to separate communication signals from noise and suppress unwanted interference across the full radio frequency spectrum. The device is expected to help next-generation wireless communication technologies efficiently convey data in an environment that is becoming crowded with signals from devices such as cell phones, self-driving vehicles, internet-connected appliances and smart city infrastructure.

“This new microwave filter chip has the potential to improve wireless communication, such as ...

Researchers have developed a way to create photonic time crystals and shown that these bizarre, artificial materials amplify the light that shines on them. These findings, described in a paper in Science Advances, could lead to more efficient and robust wireless communications and significantly improved lasers.

Time crystals were first conceived by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012. Mundane, familiar crystals have a structural pattern that repeats in space, but in a time crystal, the pattern repeats in time instead. While some physicists were initially sceptical that time crystals could exist, recent experiments have succeeding in creating them...