Category Technology/Electronics

Ultrathin sheets of a new 2-D hybrid perovskite are square-shaped and relatively large in area, properties that should facilitate their integration into future electronic devices. Credit: Courtesy of Peidong Yang, Berkeley Lab

These ionic materials exhibit optical properties not found in 2D covalent semiconductors eg graphene, making them promising alternatives to silicon for future electronic devices. To the growing list of 2D semiconductors, eg graphene, boron nitride, and molybdenum disulfide, whose unique electronic properties make them potential successors to silicon in future devices, you can now add hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites...

The patented new system harnesses a unique mixture of technologies to pre-heat domestic hot water for radiators, baths and showers while also generating electricity. More than half of domestic energy use in the UK is to heat water. At its heart is the use of heat pipes – superconductors of heat energy – found in high tech devices from PCs to the International Space Station where they prevent it from melting in the heat of the sun on one side and freezing in the vacuum of space on the other.

“Until now there was no system which fully addressed all the technical and practical issues that face making an entire building’s roof a solar-powered generator of both heat energy and electrical energy...

This discovery opens up a new class of materials for scientists working on ‘skyrmionics,’ which aims to build memory and logic devices based on skyrmions (tiny magnetic vortices). The field of skyrmionics has developed rapidly over the last few years. The very small (around 10 nm) magnetic vortices could provide a new way to build memory and logical devices with a very low energy use. ‘In fact, a computer memory system based on magnetic bubbles, which are basically very large skyrmions, was invented in the 1967 at Bell Labs’, explains Maxim Mostovoy, Associate Prof of Theoretical Physics at the University of Groningen...

The ‘just right’ structure that emerges when you drive a system containing light and matter (like the universe), neither too fast nor too slow across a quantum phase transition. It illustrates the findings of the study titled “Enhanced dynamic light-matter entanglement from driving neither too fast nor too slow,” published in the journal Physical Review. Credit: Oscar Acevedo, Universidad de los Andes, and Neil Johnson, University of Miami. The study is a collaboration between the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and the University of Miami.

By studying a system that couples matter and light together, like the universe, researchers have found crossing a quantum phase transition at intermediate speeds generates the richest, most complex structure...