News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

It sounds like an old-school vinyl record, but the distinctive crackle in the music streamed into Chris Holloway's laboratory is atomic in origin. The group spent years finding a way to directly measure electric fields using atoms. They don't expect the atomic-recording's lower sound quality to replace digital music recordings, but the team is considering how this 'entertaining' example of atomic sensing could be applied in communication devices of the future.

UTokyo researchers have created an electronic component that demonstrates functions and abilities important to future generations of computational logic and memory devices. It is between one and two orders of magnitude more power efficient than previous attempts to create a component with the same kind of behavior. This fact could help it realize developments in the emerging field of spintronics.

The flow of traffic through our nation's highways and byways is meticulously mapped and studied, but less is known about how materials in cells travel. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Missouri is challenging prior theories about how material leaves the inside of an E.coli cell. This discovery could have important implications for how we treat diseases.

In conventional electron microscopes, performing atomic-resolution observations of magnetic materials is particularly difficult because high magnetic fields are inevitably exerted on samples inside the magnetic objective lens. Newly developed magnetic objective-lens system provides a magnetic-field-free environment at the sample position. This enables direct, atom-resolved imaging of magnetic materials such as silicon steels. This novel electron microscope is expected to be extensively used for the research and development of advanced magnetic materials.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a completely new way of capturing, amplifying and linking light to matter at the nanolevel. Using a tiny box, built from stacked atomically thin material, they have succeeded in creating a type of feedback loop in which light and matter become one. The discovery, which was recently published in Nature Nanotechnology, opens up new possibilities in the world of nanophotonics.

NITech scientists have developed the method to make sure the mechanisms to connect between the two-dimensional layer of atoms and the semiconductors as perfect as possible, which will lead to develop novel optoelectronic devices.

For the first time, researchers have observed a break in a single quantum system. The observation--and how they made the observation--has potential implications for physics beyond the standard understanding of how quantum particles interact to produce matter and allow the world to function as we know it.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teleported a computer circuit instruction known as a quantum logic operation between two separated ions (electrically charged atoms), showcasing how quantum computer programs could carry out tasks in future large-scale quantum networks.

Physicists report that they can build and control particles that behave like tiny atoms with a precision never seen before.