News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

At the BESSY II storage ring, a team has shown how the helicity of circularly polarized synchrotron radiation can be switched faster - up to a million times faster than before. They used an elliptical double-undulator developed at HZB and operated the storage ring in the so-called two-orbit mode. This is a special mode of operation that was only recently developed at BESSY II and provides the basis for fast switching.

Scientists studying high-Tc superconductors at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have definitive evidence for the existence of a state of matter known as a pair density wave -- first predicted by theorists some 50 years ago. Their results show that this phase coexists with superconductivity in a well-known bismuth-based copper-oxide superconductor.

Recently, Wang Jian group at Peking University, in collaboration with Professor Wang Ziqiang at Boston College and Professor Hu Jiangping at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, detected novel ZEBSs resembling the characteristics of MZMs in interstitial Fe adatoms deposited on the high-temperature superconducting thin films at two-dimensional limit.

Transistors work electrically, but data can be transmitted more quickly by using light. Scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich have now come a step closer to integrating lasers directly in silicon chips. Together with researchers from Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies in Paris and the French company STMicroelectronics as well as CEA-LETI Grenoble, they have developed a compatible semiconductor laser made of germanium and tin, whose efficiency is comparable with conventional GaAs semiconductor lasers on Si.

The crystal structure at the surface of semiconductor materials can make them behave like metals and even like superconductors, a joint Swansea/Rostock research team has shown. The discovery potentially opens the door to advances like more energy-efficient electronic devices.