Category Technology/Electronics

The ubiquity of smart devices—not just phones and watches, but lights, refrigerators, doorbells and more, all constantly recording and transmitting data—is creating massive volumes of digital information that drain energy and slow data transmission speeds. With the rising use of artificial intelligence in industries ranging from health care and finance to transportation and manufacturing, addressing the issue is becoming more pressing.

A research team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst aims to address the problem wi...

Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have created a molecule that naturally forms p/n junctions, structures that are vital for converting sunlight into electricity. Their findings offer a promising shortcut to producing more efficient organic thin-film solar cells. Their study is published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

How organic solar cells work
Solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity. Within each cell, two semiconductors—p-type and n-type—form a p/n junction, where the photovoltaic effect performs the conversion.

Organic thin-film solar cells use carbon-based semiconductors instead of the traditional silicon, making them lightweight, flexible, and economic...

What if you could create new materials just by shining a light at them? To most, this sounds like science fiction or alchemy, but to physicists investigating the burgeoning field of Floquet engineering, this is the goal. With a periodic drive, like light, scientists can “dress up” the electronic structure of any material, altering its fundamental properties—such as turning a simple semiconductor into a superconductor.

While the theory of Floquet physics has been investigated since a bold proposal by Oka and Aoki in 2009, only a handful of experiments within the past decade have managed to demonstrate Floquet effects...