News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

A team of researchers from Nagoya University, Japan, and Technical University of Darmstadt have developed a technique for quantitatively studying the effect of light on nanoscale mechanical properties of thin wafers of semiconductors or any other crystalline material. The group has found clear evidence that propagation of dislocations - slippages of crystal planes - in semiconductors is suppressed by light. The likely cause is interaction between dislocations and electrons and holes excited by the light.

Just as James Cameron's Terminator-800 was able to discriminate between "clothes, boots, and a motorcycle", machine-learning could identify different areas of interest on 2D materials. The simple, automated optical identification of fundamentally-different physical areas on these materials could significantly accelerate their application in next-generation, energy-efficient computing, optoelectronics and future smart-phones.

In a twist befitting the strange nature of quantum mechanics, physicists have discovered the Hall effect -- a characteristic change in the way electricity is conducted in the presence of a magnetic field -- in a nonmagnetic quantum material to which no magnetic field was applied.

For practical applications, two-dimensional materials such as graphene must at some point connect with the ordinary world of 3D materials. MIT researchers have come up with a way of imaging what goes on at these interfaces, down to the level of individual atoms, with the goal of better controlling these materials' electronic properties.

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology show that DNA can serve as a scaffold for light-harvesting supramolecules, where fluorescent dyes work as electron donors and buckyballs as electron acceptors. The DNA's regular 3D structure increases the light-to-electrons conversion efficiency by reducing so-called self-quenching. Such DNA-based supramolecules could be used in future organic solar cells.