Category Technology/Electronics

University of Vermont scientists have invented a new way to create what they are calling an electron superhighway in an organic semiconductor that promises to allow electrons to flow faster and farther — aiding the hunt for flexible electronics, organic solar cells, and other low-cost alternatives to silicon. To explore these organic materials, UVM graduate students (from left) Naveen Rawat and Lane Manning, and professors Randy Headrick and Madalina Furis, deployed this table-top scanning laser microscope. Their latest finding is reported in the journal Nature Communications — and may, someday not too far off, let you roll up your computer like a piece of paper. Credit: Joshua Brown, UVM

This approach promises to allow electrons to flow faster and farther – aiding the hunt for flexible el...

Bathed in simulated sunlight, this photoelectrolysis cell in the lab of Song Jin, a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using a catalyst made of the abundant elements cobalt, phosphorus and sulfur. Credit: David Tenenbaum/University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jin’s research team reports a hydrogen-making catalyst containing phosphorus and sulfur – both common elements – and cobalt, a metal that is 1,000 times cheaper than platinum. This is in answer to the major roadblock to “hydrogen economy”, ie the need for platinum or other expensive noble metals in the water-splitting devices. Noble metals are normally used as they resist oxidation and include many of the precious metals, such as platinum, palladium, iridium and gold.

Catalyst...

This was first deemed impossible. Apps include: novel, energy-efficient electronic devices, particularly integrated circuits. A spin wave is caused by a perturbation of local magnetisation direction in a magnetic material. Such a perturbation is caused by an electron with an opposite spin, relative to the magnetisation. Spin waves transmit these perturbations in the material. This research demonstrates for the first time that it is possible to transmit electric signals in an insulating material.

So far, electrical circuits based on spin waves have not been realised, since it turned out to be impossible to introduce a perturbation in the system large enough to create spin waves...

. On-chip visible-to-infrared supercontinuum generation with more than 495 THz spectral bandwidth Credit: http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.23.019596

Sending information with the help of light is an exciting prospect for future technologies. It requires ‘light chips’, made of a special glass (already known for their extremely low losses) which now have been equipped with ‘active’ functionalities, eg generating, strengthening, and modulating light. Their chip is capable of creating a very wide light spectrum that runs from blue to infrared, 470 to 2130 nm wavelengths. By doing so they have made a light chip with the largest frequency range ever.

The width and regularity of the light spectrum plays a central role in fiber optics info transfer...