Category Technology/Electronics

The schematic depicts the time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy instrumentation that allowed the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit to visualize electron movements. The 800nm pump pulse (red) excites electrons while the weaker 266nm probing pulse (blue) allows for different measurements of electron movements to be taken. Credit: Michael Man

Ever since J.J. Thompson’s 1897 discovery of the electron, scientists have attempted to describe the subatomic particle’s motion using a variety of different means. New research from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) has made this process much easier.

I wanted to see the electrons move, not just to explain their motion by measuring a change of light transmission and refle...

Photograph and schematic lay-out of the experimental setup, featuring an improved flow field design and a reduced thickness of the graphite window (500 µm). The latter is transparent to X-rays at the K edge energies (6 8 keV) of transition metal catalysts such as manganese, iron, cobalt and nickel. The improved cell design therefore also enables operando XAS studies of commonly investigated fuel cell catalysts based on these 3d transition metal alloys with platinum, or of PGM-free iron-based catalysts. Credit: Image courtesy of Universiteit van Amsterdam (UVA)

The structure of the palladium catalyst for hydrogen oxidation in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells has been revealed...

Turning brewery wastewater into battery power

CU Boulder engineers have developed an innovative bio-manufacturing process that uses a biological organism cultivated in brewery wastewater to create the carbon-based materials needed to make energy storage cells. This unique pairing of breweries and batteries could set up a win-win opportunity by reducing expensive wastewater treatment costs for beer makers while providing manufacturers with a more cost-effective means of creating renewable, naturally-derived fuel cell technologies.

“Breweries use about 7 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced,” said Tyler Huggins, CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “And they can’t just dump it into the sewer because it requires extra filtration...

Schematic of a transistor with a molybdenum disulfide channel and 1-nanometer carbon nanotube gate. Credit: Sujay Desai/UC Berkeley

Research breaks major barrier in transistor size by creating gate only 1nm long. For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5nm threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about 1/4 the size of high-end 20nm-gate transistors now on the market.

“We made the smallest transistor reported to date,” said Javey, lead principal investigator of the Electronic Materials program in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Science Division. “The gate length is considered a defining dimension of the transistor...