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Category: engineering – Page 23

Diamond nanoparticles get a quantum upgrade with shell inspired by TV technology

Putting hypersensitive quantum sensors in a living cell is a promising path for tracking cell growth and diagnosing diseases—even cancers—in their early stages.

Many of the best, most powerful quantum sensors can be created in small bits of diamond, but that leads to a separate issue: It’s hard to stick a diamond in a cell and get it to work.

“All kinds of those processes that you really need to probe on a , you cannot use something very big. You have to go inside the cell. For that, we need nanoparticles,” said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Ph.D. candidate Uri Zvi. “People have used diamond nanocrystals as biosensors before, but they discovered that they perform worse than what we would expect. Significantly worse.”

Facing the storm: Researchers model a new line of coastal defense with horizontal levees

As ocean levels rise, coastal communities face an ever-increasing risk of severe flooding. The existing infrastructure protecting many of these communities was not built to withstand the combined threat of rising seas and severe storms seen in this century.

While reinforcing existing flood barriers poses a costly challenge for at-risk communities, it also provides the opportunity to introduce innovative solutions that can provide both flood prevention and environmental benefits.

A group of researchers at UC Santa Cruz and the U.S. Geological Survey has evaluated one such flood mitigation solution, which can reinforce while creating environmentally beneficial coastal habitats. In a study published on May 9 in Scientific Reports, the team evaluated the effectiveness of “horizontal levees”—traditional levees retrofitted with a sloping, wetland border—as a means of strengthening shorelines against the threat of rising sea levels.

A new approach could fractionate crude oil using much less energy

Separating crude oil into products such as gasoline, diesel, and heating oil is an energy-intensive process that accounts for about 6% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Most of that energy goes into the heat needed to separate the components by their boiling point.

In an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for fractionation, MIT engineers have developed a that filters the components of crude oil by their molecular size.

“This is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process. Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size? The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very at an atomistic length scale,” says Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

Scientists identify new 2D copper boride material with unique atomic structure

More than ten years ago, researchers at Rice University led by materials scientist Boris Yakobson predicted that boron atoms would cling too tightly to copper to form borophene, a flexible, metallic two-dimensional material with potential across electronics, energy and catalysis. Now, new research shows that prediction holds up, but not in the way anyone expected.

Unlike systems such as graphene on , where atoms may diffuse into the substrate without forming a distinct alloy, the in this case formed a defined 2D copper boride ⎯ a new compound with a distinct atomic structure. The finding, published in Science Advances by researchers from Rice and Northwestern University, sets the stage for further exploration of a relatively untapped class of 2D materials.

“Borophene is still a material at the brink of existence, and that makes any new fact about it important by pushing the envelope of our knowledge in materials, physics and electronics,” said Yakobson, Rice’s Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Engineering and professor of materials science and nanoengineering and chemistry. “Our very first theoretical analysis warned that on copper, boron would bond too strongly. Now, more than a decade later, it turns out we were right ⎯ and the result is not , but something else entirely.”

Quantum eyes on energy loss: Diamond quantum imaging can enable next-gen power electronics

Improving energy conversion efficiency in power electronics is vital for a sustainable society, with wide-bandgap semiconductors like GaN and SiC power devices offering advantages due to their high-frequency capabilities. However, energy losses in passive components at high frequencies hinder efficiency and miniaturization. This underscores the need for advanced soft magnetic materials with lower energy losses.

In a study published in Communications Materials, a research team led by Professor Mutsuko Hatano from the School of Engineering, Institute of Science, Tokyo, Japan, has developed a novel method for analyzing such losses by simultaneously imaging the amplitude and phase of alternating current (AC) stray fields, which are key to understanding hysteresis losses.

Using a diamond quantum sensor with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers and developing two protocols—qubit frequency tracking (Qurack) for kHz and quantum heterodyne (Qdyne) imaging for MHz frequencies—they realized wide-range AC magnetic field imaging. This study was carried out in collaboration with Harvard University and Hitachi, Ltd.

Quantum simulator realizes strongly interacting Mott-Meissner phases in bosonic flux ladders

When exposed to periodic driving, which is the time-dependent manipulation of a system’s parameters, quantum systems can exhibit interesting new phases of matter that are not present in time-independent (i.e., static) conditions. Among other things, periodic driving can be useful for the engineering of synthetic gauge fields, artificial constructs that mimic the behavior of electromagnetic fields and can be leveraged to study topological many-body physics using neutral atom quantum simulators.

Researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST) recently realized a strongly interacting phase of matter in large-scale bosonic flux ladders, known as the Mott-Meissner phase, using a neutral atom quantum simulator. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open new exciting possibilities for the in-depth study of topological quantum matter.

“Our work was inspired by a long-standing effort across the field of neutral atom quantum simulation to study strongly interacting phases of matter in the presence of magnetic fields,” Alexander Impertro, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The interplay of these two ingredients can create a variety of quantum many-body phases with exotic properties.

Study shows domain walls in ferroelectrics can be the most stable state, enabling high-density memory

A research team, led by Professor Junhee Lee from the Graduate School of Semiconductor Materials and Devices Engineering at UNIST, has demonstrated through quantum mechanical calculations that charged domain walls in ferroelectrics—once thought to be unstable—can, in fact, be more stable than the bulk regions.

This discovery opens new avenues for developing high-density semiconductor memory devices capable of storing information as binary states (0s and 1s) based on the presence or absence of .

This research was conducted in collaboration with researchers Pawan Kumar and Dipti Gupta, who served as the first author and co-author, respectively. The research is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A rule-breaking, colorful silicone that can conduct electricity

A newly discovered silicone variant is a semiconductor, University of Michigan researchers have discovered—upending assumptions that the material class is exclusively insulating.

“The material opens up the opportunity for new types of flat-panel displays, flexible photovoltaics, wearable sensors or even clothing that can display different patterns or images,” said Richard Laine, U-M professor of materials science and engineering and macromolecular science and engineering and corresponding author of the study recently published in Macromolecular Rapid Communications.

Silicone oils and rubbers—polysiloxanes and silsesquioxanes—are traditionally insulating materials, meaning they resist the flow of electricity or heat. Their water-resistant properties make them useful in biomedical devices, sealants, electronic coatings and more.

An accidentally discovered class of nanostructured materials can passively harvest water from air

A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy.

The research, published in Science Advances, describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.

The interdisciplinary team includes Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE); Amish Patel, Professor in CBE; Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author; and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich.

Physics advance details new way to control solid objects in liquid

Researchers have detailed the physics behind a phenomenon that allows them to create spin in liquid droplets using ultrasound waves, which concentrates solid particles suspended in the liquid. The discovery will allow researchers to engineer technologies that make use of the technique to develop applications in fields such as biomedical testing and drug development.

“By creating on the surface of a piezoelectric substrate, we can induce spin in a liquid droplet that is resting on that substrate,” explains Chuyi Chen, an assistant professor of mechanical and at North Carolina State University and co-lead author of a paper on the work published in Science Advances.

The oscillation of the ultrasound waves pushes the fluid inside the droplet to stream in a circle, but the surface tension of the droplet prevents the droplet from spreading out into a flat sheet. A combination of forces from the ultrasound waves, the spinning droplet, and the fluid moving within the droplet drives particles inside the droplet to move in a helical pattern, essentially corkscrewing through the droplet to come together at a central point.

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