News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

The widespread adoption of thermoelectric devices that can directly convert electricity into thermal energy for cooling and heating has been hindered, in part, by the lack of materials that are both inexpensive and highly efficient at room temperature. Now researchers from the University of Houston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have reported the discovery of a new material that works efficiently at room temperature while requiring almost no costly tellurium, a major component of the current state-of-the-art material.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits. It easily switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current, and back again to a superconductor -- all with a simple flip of a switch.

UCLouvain's researchers have discovered a new high performance and safe battery material (LTPS) capable of speeding up charge and discharge to a level never observed so far. Practically, if the first tests are confirmed, this new material could be used in the batteries of the future with better energy storage, faster charge and discharge and higher safety targeting many uses from smartphones, to electric bicycle and cars. These results are published in the prestigious journal Chem from Cell Press.

Two physics research groups at the University of Kansas have generated free electrons from organic semiconductors when combined with a single atomic layer of molybdenum disulfide, a recently discovered two-dimensional semiconductor.

An end-to-end transmitter-receiver created by engineers in UCI's Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs, is a 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip that is capable of processing digital signals with significantly greater speed and energy efficiency because of its unique digital-analog architecture.

There's no known way to prove a three-dimensional 'quantum spin liquid' exists, so Rice University physicists and their collaborators did the next best thing: They showed their crystals of cerium zirconium pyrochlore had the right stuff to qualify as the first possible 3D version of the long-sought state of matter.

In modern synchrotron sources and free-electron lasers, superconducting radio-frequency cavity resonators are able to supply electron bunches with extremely high energy. These resonators are currently constructed of pure niobium. Now an international collaboration has investigated the potential advantages a niobium-tin coating might offer in comparison to pure niobium.

In quasiparticles known as polaritons, states of light and matter are strongly coupled. The group of Prof. Ataç ?mamo?lu at ETH Zurich has now developed a new approach to study nonlinear optical properties of polaritons in strongly correlated electronic states. In doing so, they opened up fresh perspectives for exploring both ingredients of the polariton: novel functionalities for photonic devices and fundamental insight into exotic states of matter.

The research group of Prof. Junsuk Rho, Sunae So and Jungho Mun of Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH developed a design with a higher degree of freedom which allows to choose materials and to design photonic structures arbitrarily by using Deep Learning.