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Category: materials – Page 9

A team of Penn State researchers has used a new 3D-printing method to produce a complex metal build that was once only possible with welding: fusing two metals together into a single structure.

Using an advanced additive manufacturing process known as multi-material laser powder bed fusion—enabled by a newly acquired system in Penn State’s Center for Innovative Materials Processing Through Direct Digital Deposition (CIMP-3D)—the researchers printed a out of a blend of low-carbon stainless steel and bronze, which consists of 90% copper and 10% tin.

The researchers have published their approach in npj Advanced Manufacturing.

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Research by physicists at The City College of New York is being credited for a novel discovery regarding the interaction of electronic excitations via spin waves. The finding by the Laboratory for Nano and Micro Photonics (LaNMP) team headed by physicist Vinod Menon could open the door to future technologies and advanced applications such as optical modulators, all-optical logic gates, and quantum transducers. The work is reported in the journal Nature Materials.

The researchers showed the emergence of interaction between electronic excitations (excitons—electron hole pairs) mediated via spin waves in atomically thin (2D) magnets. They demonstrated that the excitons can interact indirectly through magnons (), which are like ripples or waves in the 2D material’s magnetic structure.

“Think of magnons as tiny flip-flops of atomic magnets inside the crystal. One exciton changes the local magnetism, and that change then influences another nearby. It’s like two floating objects pulling toward each other by disturbing water waves around them,” said Menon.

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Twisted moiré photonic crystals—an advanced type of optical metamaterial—have shown enormous potential in the race to engineer smaller, more capable and more powerful optical systems. How do they work?

Imagine you have two pieces of fabric with regular patterns, like stripes or checkers. When you lay the two pieces of fabric directly on top of each other, you can see each pattern clearly. But if you slightly shift one piece of fabric or twist it, new patterns that weren’t in either of the original fabrics emerge.

In twisted moiré photonic crystals, how the layers twist and overlap can change how the material interacts with light. By changing the twist angle and the spacing between layers, these materials can be fine-tuned to control and manipulate different aspects of light simultaneously—meaning the multiple optical components typically needed to simultaneously measure light’s phase, polarization, and wavelength could be replaced with one device.

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A team of international researchers has developed a groundbreaking class of mechanical metamaterials capable of storing and releasing elastic energy at unprecedented levels. By cleverly twisting rods into a helical shape and integrating them into a new metamaterial structure, they’ve overcome tra

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A trio of US researchers claim to have successfully tested predictions that it’s possible to harvest clean energy from the natural rhythms and processes of our planet, generating electricity as Earth rotates through its own magnetic field.

Though the voltage they produced was tiny, the possibility could give rise to a new way to generate electricity from our planet’s dynamics, alongside tidal, solar, wind, and geothermal power production.

In 2016, Princeton astrophysicist Christopher Chyba and JPL planetary scientist Kevin Hand challenged their own proof that such a feat ought to be impossible. The researchers have now uncovered empirical evidence that their proof-breaking idea may actually work, as long as the shape and properties of the conducting material in their method are set to very specific requirements.

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A team of engineers at Fudan University has successfully designed, built and run a 32-bit RISC-V microprocessor that uses molybdenum disulfide instead of silicon as its semiconductor component. Their paper is published in the journal Nature.

Most microprocessors are made using the semiconductor silicon, which has worked out well for several decades. But as researchers attempt to make processors ever smaller, they have run into a dead end with silicon—they cannot make it any thinner. Instead, many researchers have turned to 2D materials such as graphene, but this is challenging because it is a conductor, not a semiconductor.

In this new study, the research team used a nearly 2D semiconducting material, single-molecule sheets of molybdenum disulfide. These sheets are not truly 2D because they bond at an angle, resulting in a slightly zigzag surface. To make a processor out of them, they put them on a sapphire substrate.

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Researchers at Northwestern University have expanded the potential of carbon capture technology that plucks CO2 directly from the air by demonstrating that there are multiple suitable and abundant materials that can facilitate direct air capture.

In a paper titled “Platform materials for moisture-swing carbon capture” published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, the researchers present new, lower-cost materials to facilitate moisture-swing to catch and then release CO2 depending on the local air’s moisture content, calling it “one of the most promising approaches for CO2 capture.”

Atmospheric CO2 continues to increase and, despite considerable worldwide efforts to cut down on carbon waste, is expected to rise more in coming decades.

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Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have developed an innovative method to study ultrafast magnetism in materials. They have shown the generation and application of magnetic field steps, in which a magnetic field is turned on in a matter of picoseconds.

The work has been published in Nature Photonics.

Magnetic fields are fundamental to controlling the magnetization of materials. Under static or slowly varying conditions, a material’s magnetization aligns with the external field like a compass needle. However, entirely new magnetization dynamics emerge when magnetic fields change on timescales—faster than the material’s response time.

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Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) and at Florida International University report in the journal Science their insights on the emerging field of complex frequency excitations, a recently introduced scheme to control light, sound and other wave phenomena beyond conventional limits.

Based on this approach, they outline opportunities that advance fundamental understanding of wave-matter interactions and usher wave-based technologies into a new era.

In conventional light-wave-and sound-wave-based systems such as wireless cell phone technologies, microscopes, speakers and earphones, control over wave phenomena is limited by constraints, which stem from the fundamental properties of the materials used in these technologies.

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A team of physicists uncovered a strange twist in how superconductors behave when they’re reduced to just a few atomic layers. Using powerful magnetic imaging, they found that superconductivity in ultra-thin materials doesn’t follow the usual rules – it becomes surface-based rather than distribut

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