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Category: materials

New sodium-sulfur battery may offer safer, cheaper alternative to lithium

Due to our ever-increasing reliance on electronics, researchers are always on the lookout for battery materials with more desirable qualities. Common battery materials, like lithium, can be prone to disadvantages like overheating and material sourcing issues, leading to safety risks and higher costs.

Now, researchers from China have revealed a new battery design that may offer a better alternative to lithium. The new study, published in Nature, describes a sodium and sulfur-based, anode-free design offering a high voltage. The sodium–sulfur (Na–S) batteries are a promising alternative to lithium-based batteries due to sodium’s abundance and potential for high energy storage.

Scientists capture first-ever high-resolution images of topological quantum Hall edge states

Read more here.

By Tom Garlinghouse

Physicists have long known that some materials behave strangely at their edges, conducting electricity without resistance even as their interiors remain insulating. These boundary phenomena, called topological edge states, form the basis of quantum technologies and exotic “topological phases” of matter. But despite decades of study, scientists could only infer how these quantum edges behave—no one had actually seen their microscopic structure in action.

Now, a collaborative team of researchers have achieved a remarkable first: they directly imaged the internal structure of these edge states in monolayer graphene, using one of the most precise tools in modern physics—scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Their results, published last week in Nature, reveal how fundamental interactions between electrons reshape the very edge of a quantum material, upending long-held theoretical assumptions and opening a new window onto quantum topological behavior.

THz spectroscopy system bypasses long-standing tradeoff between spectral and spatial resolution

Terahertz (THz) radiation, which occupies the frequency band between microwaves and infrared light, is essential in many next-generation applications, including high-speed wireless communications, chemical sensing, and advanced material analysis.

To harness THz waves, scientists rely on functional devices like metasurfaces and resonant gratings, which exhibit sharp and effective resonance features. Characterizing and optimizing these high-performance devices, however, remains a technical challenge.

The difficulty stems from a fundamental tradeoff when performing THz measurements: achieving high spectral resolution versus high spatial resolution. To accurately capture the narrow spectral fingerprints of certain gases and the features of devices with a high quality factor (Q), researchers need very high spectral resolution.

‘Pocket-type’ high-temperature superconducting coil achieves 44.86 tesla combined magnetic field

A research team led by Kuang Guangli and Jiang Donghui at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CHMFL), has developed a “pocket-type” high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coil, achieving a record combined magnetic field of 44.86 tesla.

The coil, wound using domestically produced REBa₂Cu₃O₇₋ₓ (REBCO) tapes, generated 28.20 T at zero field in a liquid helium bath and produced an additional 10.36 T inside the 34.5 T steady-state magnetic field of the WM5 water-cooled magnet.

Steady high magnetic fields are critical for frontier research in materials science, physics, and biology, enabling scientists to observe new phenomena and explore new laws of matter. REBCO high-temperature superconducting material has become one of the optimal choices for developing devices that generate higher magnetic fields, owing to its high current-carrying capacity and favorable mechanical properties.

Discoveries rewrite how some minerals form and dissolve

Two related discoveries detailing nanocrystalline mineral formation and dynamics have broad implications for managing nuclear waste, predicting soil weathering, designing advanced bioproducts and materials and optimizing commercial alumina production.

The two recently published studies combine detailed molecular imaging and molecular modeling to sort out how gibbsite, a common aluminum-containing mineral, forms and dissolves in exquisite detail.

Scientists Create a New Crystal That Twists Magnetism Into Exotic Swirls

By forcing crystal structures to compete, scientists uncovered a new way to make magnetism twist. Florida State University scientists have developed a new crystalline material whose magnetic behavior differs sharply from that of conventional magnets, opening potential paths toward advances in dat

Cosmic rays from a nearby supernova may help explain Earth-like planets

How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my research would eventually lead me to ask a question about the origin of Earth-like planets. Yet that is exactly where it brought me.

For decades, planetary scientists have believed that the early solar system was enriched with short-lived radioactive elements—such as aluminum-26—by a nearby supernova. These radioactive elements played a crucial role in forming water-depleted rocky planets such as Earth. Their decay heated young planetesimals, causing them to lose much of their originally accreted water and other volatile materials.

There was just one problem that kept bothering me.

New generator uses carbon fiber to turn raindrops into rooftop electricity

A research team affiliated with UNIST has introduced a technology that generates electricity from raindrops striking rooftops, offering a self-powered approach to automated drainage control and flood warning during heavy rainfall.

Led by Professor Young-Bin Park of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST, the team developed a droplet-based electricity generator (DEG) using carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP). This device, called the superhydrophobic fiber-reinforced polymer (S-FRP-DEG), converts the impact of falling rain into electrical signals capable of operating stormwater management systems without an external power source. The findings are published in Advanced Functional Materials.

CFRP composites are lightweight, yet durable, and are used in a variety of applications, such as aerospace and construction because of their strength and resistance to corrosion. Such characteristics make it well suited for long-term outdoor installation on rooftops and other exposed urban structures.

Optical system uses diffractive processors to achieve large-scale nonlinear computation

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an optical computing framework that performs large-scale nonlinear computations using linear materials.

Reported in eLight, the study demonstrates that diffractive optical processors—thin, passive material structures composed of phase-only layers—can compute numerous nonlinear functions simultaneously, executed rapidly at extreme parallelism and spatial density, bound by the diffraction limit of light.

Nonlinear operations underpin nearly all modern information-processing tasks, from and pattern recognition to general-purpose computing. Yet, implementing such operations optically has remained a challenge, as most are weak, power-hungry, or slow.

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