Jan 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A highly unusual movement of light emitting particles in atomically-thin semiconductors was experimentally confirmed by scientists from the Würzburg–Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat–Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter. Electronic quasiparticles, known as excitons, seemed to move in opposite directions at the same time. Professor Alexey...
Atomic armor for accelerators enables discoveries
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Protective coatings are common for many things in daily life that see a lot of use: we coat wood floors with finish; apply Teflon to the paint on cars; even use diamond coatings on medical devices. Protective coatings are also essential in many demanding research...
Studying the Big Bang with artificial intelligence
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) It could hardly be more complicated: tiny particles whir around wildly with extremely high energy, countless interactions occur in the tangled mess of quantum particles, and this results in a state of matter known as "quark-gluon plasma". Immediately after the Big Bang, the entire universe...
Simulations shed significant light on janus nanoparticles
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Named for a Roman god, Janus particles refer to nanoparticles that possess surfaces with two or more distinct physical chemical properties. The special nanoparticles were introduced to the scientific community by 1991 Nobel Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who pointed out that "objects with two...
A soft, stretchable, self-powered thermometer (w/video)
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The next generation of soft robotics, smart clothing and biocompatible medical devices are going to need integrated soft sensors that can stretch and twist with the device or wearer. The challenge: most of the components used in traditional sensing are rigid. Now, researchers at the...
Asymmetry is key to creating more stable blue perovskite LEDs
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) From street and household lighting, to television and mobile displays, light emitting diodes (LEDs) play an essential role in modern life. Now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed blue LEDs based on a material called metal halide...
Getting hydrogen out of banana peels
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) As the world’s energy demands increase, so does our consumption of fossil fuels. The result is a massive rise in greenhouse gases emissions with severely adverse environmental effects. To address this, scientists have been searching for alternative, renewable sources of energy. A main candidate is...
Ion pairings change honeycomb crystal states
Jan 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Tohoku University researchers have observed a rare change in the structure of a mineral-like crystal that, if controlled, could lead to the development of new functional materials. The findings were reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society ("Cation Dimerization in a 3d1 honeycomb...
Extraordinary black hole found in neighboring galaxy
Jan 24, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers discovered a black hole unlike any other. At one hundred thousand solar masses, it is smaller than the black holes we have found at the centers of galaxies, but bigger than the black holes that are born when stars explode. This makes it one...
Scientists make first detection of exotic ‘X’ particles in quark-gluon plasma
Jan 24, 2022 (Nanowerk News) In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a roiling, trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons — elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make the neutrons and...