Chains of fused carbon-containing rings have unique optoelectronic properties that make them useful as semiconductors. These chains, known as acenes, can also be tuned to emit different colors of light, which makes them good candidates for use in organic light-emitting diodes. The color of light emitted by an acene is determined by its length, but…

Graphene, that is extremely thin carbon, is considered a true miracle material. An international research team has now added another facet to its diverse properties with experiments at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR): The experts, led by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), fired short terahertz pulses at micrometer-sized discs of graphene, which briefly turned these minuscule…

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A team of physicists at the University of Cologne has solved a long-standing problem of condensed matter physics: they have directly observed the Kondo effect (the re-grouping of electrons in a metal caused by magnetic impurities) visible in a single artificial atom. This has not been done successfully in the past, since the magnetic orbitals…

Sodium- and potassium-ion batteries are promising next-generation alternatives to the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, their energy density still lags behind that of LIBs. To tackle this issue, researchers from Japan explored an innovative strategy to turn hard carbon into an excellent negative electrode material. Using inorganic zinc-based compounds as a template during synthesis, they…

Researchers at Delft University of Technology, led by assistant professor Richard Norte, have unveiled a remarkable new material with potential to impact the world of material science: amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC). Beyond its exceptional strength, this material demonstrates mechanical properties crucial for vibration isolation on a microchip. Amorphous silicon carbide is therefore particularly suitable for…

The ‘wonder material’ graphene is well-known for its high electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and flexibility. Stacking two layers of graphene with atomic layer thickness produces bilayer graphene, which possesses excellent electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. As such, bilayer graphene has attracted significant attention and is being utilized in a host of next-generation devices, including quantum…

Ordinary pencil lead holds extraordinary properties when shaved down to layers as thin as an atom. A single, atom-thin sheet of graphite, known as graphene, is just a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair. Under a microscope, the material resembles a chicken-wire of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal lattice. Despite its…

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) semiconductors are special materials that have long fascinated researchers with their unique properties. For one, they are flat, one-atom-thick two-dimensional (2D) materials similar to that of graphene. They are compounds that contain different combinations of the transition metal group (e.g., molybdenum, tungsten) and chalcogen elements (e.g., sulfur, selenium, tellurium). What’s even…

A single-atom-thick sheet of carbon known as graphene has remarkable properties on its own, but things can get even more interesting when you stack up multiple sheets. When two or more overlying sheets of graphene are sightly misaligned — twisted at certain angles relative to each other — they take on a plethora of exotic…

A probable early driver of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of molecules called amyloid peptides. These cause cell death, and are commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have now shown that yeast cells that accumulate these misfolded amyloid peptides can recover after being treated with graphene…

The friction on a graphene surface can be dynamically tuned using external electric fields, according to researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign led by Professor Rosa Espinosa-Marzal of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The work is detailed in the paper, “Dynamically tuning friction at the graphene interface using the field effect,” published…

A research team has successfully developed a new method that can prevent the crossover of large fuel molecules and suppress the degradation of electrodes in advanced fuel cell technology using methanol or formic acid. The successful sieving of the fuel molecules is achieved via selective proton transfers due to steric hindrance on holey graphene sheets…

Researchers at UCL (University College London) have created one-atom-thick ribbons made of phosphorus alloyed with arsenic that could dramatically improve the efficiency of devices such as batteries, supercapacitors and solar cells. The research team discovered phosphorus nanoribbons in 2019. The “wonder material,” predicted to revolutionise devices ranging from batteries to biomedical sensors, has since been…

A team of researchers, led by Professor Jungki Ryu in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST and Professor Soojin Park from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), have achieved a significant breakthrough in the development of a hybrid silicon photocatalyst. This innovative catalyst utilizes solar power to produce hydrogen and high-value…

Researchers have developed a method of “wiring up” graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), a class of one-dimensional materials that are of interest in the scaling of microelectronic devices. Using a direct-write scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) based process, the nanometer-scale metal contacts were fabricated on individual GNRs and could control the electronic character of the GNRs. The researchers…

Hydrogen is viewed as a promising alternative to fossil fuel, but the methods used to make it either generate too much carbon dioxide or are too expensive. Rice University researchers have found a way to harvest hydrogen from plastic waste using a low-emissions method that could more than pay for itself. “In this work, we…

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) provide our portable devices like tablets and mobiles — and increasingly also vehicles — with power. As the share of volatile renewable energy needing electricity storage increases, more and more LIBs are needed, lithium prices rise, resources dwindle, and the amount of depleted batteries that contain toxic substances increases. In the journal…

National University of Singapore (NUS) physicists have developed a technique to precisely control the alignment of supermoiré lattices by using a set of golden rules, paving the way for the advancement of next generation moiré quantum matter. Moiré patterns are formed when two identical periodic structures are overlaid with a relative twist angle between them…

Nothing in the world is perfect. This is also true in materials research. In computer simulations, one often represents a system in a highly idealized way; for example, one calculates the properties that an absolutely perfect crystal would have. In practice, however, we always have to deal with additional effects — with defects in the…

A new approach to quantum light emitters generates a stream of circularly polarized single photons, or particles of light, that may be useful for a range of quantum information and communication applications. A Los Alamos National Laboratory team stacked two different, atomically thin materials to realize this chiral quantum light source. “Our research shows that…

A new study led by Dr. Xuekun Lu from Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with an international team of researchers from the UK and USA has found a way to prevent lithium plating in electric vehicle batteries, which could lead to faster charging times. The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.…

Researchers from The University of Warwick and the University of Manchester have finally solved the long-standing puzzle of why graphene is so much more permeable to protons than expected by theory. A decade ago, scientists at The University of Manchester demonstrated that graphene is permeable to protons, nuclei of hydrogen atoms. The unexpected result started…