chirality tagged posts

Power up: New Polymer Property could Boost Accessible Solar Power

Organic solar cells like the one pictured are emerging as a viable solution to meet the nation’s growing energy demand. Credit: Azzaya Khasbaatar, a graduate student in the Diao Group.

Lightweight as a window cling and replicable as a newspaper, organic solar cells are emerging as a viable solution for the nation’s growing energy demand.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are the first to observe a biological property called chirality emerging in achiral conjugated polymers, which are used to design flexible solar cells. Their discovery could help enhance the cells’ charge capacity and increase access to affordable renewable energy.

DNA’s coiled architecture is recognizable to many as a helix...

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Unique Material could Unlock New Functionality in Semiconductors

The synthesized crystal, shown here, carries both ferroelectricity and chirality

If new and promising semiconductor materials are to make it into our phones, computers, and other increasingly capable electronics, researchers must obtain greater control over how those materials function.

In an article published today in Science Advances, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers detailed how they designed and synthesized a unique material with controllable capabilities that make it very promising for future electronics.

The researchers synthesized the material an organic-inorganic hybrid crystal made up of carbon, iodine, and lead and then demonstrated that it was capable of two material properties previously unseen in a single material...

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Scientists find twisting 3D Raceway for Electrons in Nanoscale Crystal Slices

Scientists find twisting 3D Raceway for Electrons in Nanoscale Crystal Slices

Scientists find twisting 3D Raceway for Electrons in Nanoscale Crystal Slices

Mysterious quantum properties in material point to new applications in electronics. Researchers have created an exotic 3D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a nanomaterial they fabricated at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) The international team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Germany observed, for the first time, a unique behavior in which electrons rotate around one surface, then through the bulk of the material to its opposite surface and back.

The possibility of developing “topological matter” that can carry electrical current on its surface without loss at room temperature has attracted significant interest in the research communit...

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