Category Technology/Electronics

Applications: plasmonic couplers & lenses that could create 2D holograms or focus light at the nanoscale.

Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates – in the duck’s case water waves, in the plane’s case sonic booms.

While nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, light isn’t always in a vacuum. It is possible for something to move faster than the phase velocity of light in a medium or material and generate a wake. The most famous example of this is Cherenkov radiation, wakes produced as electrical charges travel through liquids faster than the phase velocity of light, emitting a glowing blue wake. In this case Harvard researchers created similar wakes of light-like waves moving on #metallic surface = surface plasmons

New material could make it possible to pack more transistors on a chip. When electrons move in a phosphorus transistor, they do so only in 2D. Thus black phosphorus could help engineers surmount one of the big challenges for future electronics: designing energy-efficient transistors. “Transistors work more efficiently when they are thin, with electrons moving in only two dimensions,” says a/Prof Szkopek, “Nothing gets thinner than a single layer of atoms.”

In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester first isolated and explored graphene and now there are other 2D materials like black phosphorus, a form of phosphorus similar to graphite and can be separated easily into single atomic layers, ie phosphorene...

Proteins use biomineralization to incorporate metallic elements into tissues, using it to create diverse materials such as seashells, teeth, and bones. However, the way proteins actually do this is not well understood.

Now RIKEN CLST & Yokohama City U scientists have used an artificially designed protein to create a cadmium chloride nanocrystal – the smallest crystal reported so far, made up of just 19 atoms – sandwiched b/n 2 copies of the protein.

In 2014, the groups announced development of an artificial protein, called Pizza6, which looks a lot like a pizza cut into 6 identical slices...

Other teams have come up with similar devices before, although no one was able to create something that didn’t rely on exotic materials or a complex fabrication process. IBS team stayed away from carbon nanotubes and gold and looked at a more utilitarian option for their build material: thin slivers of silver nanowires ∼150 nm in diameter and ∼30 μm in length (a human hair ranges from 17 – 181 µm). The nanowires were mixed into a liquid elastic material which is both soft and stretchy when dry.

To ensure that the material remains tight on the target area while heating, the team devised a 2D interlocking coil pattern for the mesh structure. To make the mesh, the liquid mixture was poured into a shaped mold...