sensors tagged posts

To further shrink electronic devices and to lower energy consumption, the semiconductor industry is interested in using 2D materials, but manufacturers need a quick and accurate method for detecting defects in these materials to determine if the material is suitable for device manufacture. Now a team of researchers has developed a technique to quickly and sensitively characterize defects in 2D materials.

Two-dimensional materials are atomically thin, the most well-known being graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms.

“People have struggled to make these 2D materials without defects,” said Mauricio Terrones, Verne M...

This is a magnified image of liquid crystals confined to spherical tactoids. Credit: Georgia Tech

A material used for coloring food items ranging from corn chips to ice creams could potentially have uses far beyond food dyes. The Georgia Institute of Technology researchers described how a class of water soluble liquid crystals, called lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals, exhibited unexpected characteristics that could be harnessed for use in sensors and other potential applications. “We were seeking to understand the aggregation and phase behavior of these plank-like molecules as a function of temperature and concentration,” said Karthik Nayani, a former Georgia Tech student who worked on the problem...

This is a schematic of an optical tweezer used in a vacuum chamber by Purdue University researchers, who controlled the “electron spin” of a levitated nanodiamond. The advance could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors and studies into the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics. Credit: Purdue University image/ Tongcang Li

Researchers have demonstrated how to control the “electron spin” of a nanodiamond while it is levitated with lasers in a vacuum, an advance that could find applications in quantum information processing, sensors, quantum mechanics studies, and measurement of magnetic and gravitational fields, which could be applied to computer memory and experiments to search for deviations from Newton’s law of gravitation. .

Electrons can be thought of as havin...