New research shows that miniscule amounts of impurities in vacuum are being incorporated into OLEDs during fabrication and leading to large variations in lifetime. By reducing the time OLEDs spend in the deposition chamber during fabrication, impurities can be reduced and lifetime enhanced. Analysis of the impurities indicates sources that include previously deposited materials and plasticizers from chamber components. Credit: Hiroshi Fujimoto and William J. Potscavage, Jr.

Reproducibility is a necessity for science but has often eluded researchers studying the lifetime of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Recent research from Japan sheds new light on why: impurities present in the vacuum chamber during fabrication but in amounts so small that they are easily overlooked...

Optical setup for two wavelength digital hologram recordings of toy puppets. M, mirror; BS, beam splitter; BE, beam-expander; RP, reflecting prism; CCD, charge coupled device; D, rotating diffuser; R, rotator and O, object.

Digital holography: Noise practically eliminated. Digital Holography is a powerful imaging technique for 3D vision and display systems. However, the use of coherent light sources introduces annoying visual phenomenon, namely speckle noise, an intrinsic interference effect due to the laser. Such coherent noise, superposing to digital holograms, severely degrades the corresponding reconstruction quality in holographic systems...

This image shows examples of engineered 3-D silk constructs. Credit: Silklab, Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Engineering, Tufts University

Tufts University engineers have created a new format of solids made from silk protein that can be preprogrammed with biological, chemical, or optical functions, eg mechanical components that change color with strain, deliver drugs, or respond to light. Using a water-based fabrication method based on protein self-assembly, the researchers generated 3D bulk materials out of silk fibroin, the protein that gives silk its durability. Then they manipulated the bulk materials with water-soluble molecules to create multiple solid forms, from nano- to micro-scale, that have embedded, pre-designed functions.

Eg, they created a surgical pin that ...

The discrepancy between the cosmological parameters in the modern Universe and the Universe shortly after the Big Bang can be explained by the fact that the proportion of dark matter has decreased. The authors of the study could calculate how much dark matter could have been lost and what the corresponding size of the unstable component would be. Researchers may explore how quickly this unstable part decays and say if dark matter is still disintegrating. CREDIT MIPT Press Office USAGE RESTRICTION

Russian scientists have discovered that the proportion of unstable particles in the composition of dark matter in the days immediately following the Big Bang was no more than 2 – 5%...