News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

NIST scientists have designed a vacuum gauge, based on ultracold trapped atoms, is small enough to deploy in commonly used vacuum chambers.

How to create nanocages, i.e., robust and stable objects with regular voids and tunable properties? Short segments of DNA molecules are perfect candidates for the controllable design of novel complex structures. Physicists investigated methodologies to synthesize DNA-based dendrimers in the lab and to predict their behavior using detailed computer simulations. Their results are published in the high-impact journal Nanoscale.

In novel concepts of magnetic data storage, it is intended to send small magnetic bits back and forth in a chip structure, store them densely packed and read them out later. The magnetic stray field generates problems when trying to generate particularly tiny bits. Now, researchers were able to put an 'invisibility cloak' over the magnetic structures. In this fashion, the magnetic stray field can be reduced in a fashion allowing for small yet mobile bits.

A new study suggests that many theorized heavy particles, if they exist at all, do not have the properties needed to explain the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. If confirmed, the findings would force significant revisions to several prominent theories posed as alternatives to the Standard Model of particle physics, which was developed in the early 1970s.

Graphene Flagship researchers have shown in a paper published in Science Advances how heterostructures built from graphene and topological insulators have strong, proximity induced spin-orbit coupling which can form the basis of novel information processing technologies.

For decades researchers have studied materials from structures to see why and how they fail. Before catastrophic failure, there are individual cracks or dislocations that form, which are signals that a structure may be weakening. While researchers have studied individual dislocations in the past, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made it possible to understand how dislocations organize and react at nanoscale.

Scientists at TU Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the ÖAW have for the first time demonstrated a wave effect that can lead to measurement errors in the optical position estimation of objects. The work now published in Nature Physics could have consequences for optical microscopy and optical astronomy, but could also play a role in position measurements using sound, radar, or gravitational waves.

By studying materials down to the atomic level, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have found a way to make catalysts more efficient and environmentally friendly. The results have been published in Nature Communications. The methods can be used to improve many different types of catalysts.