All-optical switching on the nanometer scale

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Ultrafast light-driven control of magnetization on the nanometer length scale is key to achieve competitive bit sizes in next generation data storage technology. Researchers at Max Born Institute in Berlin and of the large scale facility Elettra in Trieste, Italy, have successfully demonstrated the ultrafast...

2D monolayer polymeric fullerene is the latest member of the carbon family

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Synthetic carbon allotropes are fascinating for their outstanding properties and potential applications. Scientists have devoted decades to synthesizing new types of carbon materials. However, a two-dimensional fullerene, which possesses unique structure, has not been successfully synthesized until now. Recently, a research group led by Prof....

Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies...

Functionalizing van der Waals materials by shaping them

Jun 15, 2022 (Nanowerk News) PN junction is the elementary building block of semiconductor devices, like diode, solar cell and LED, which make up the modern (opto-)electronics. Recently, researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed a novel method to fabricate two-dimensional...

Real-time imaging of dynamic atom-atom interactions

Jun 14, 2022 (Nanowerk News) In a breakthrough, Tokyo Tech researchers have managed to observe and characterize dynamic assembly of metallic atoms using an ingenious combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy and a video-based tracking (Nature Communications, "Dynamic hetero-metallic bondings visualized by sequential atom imaging"). By visualizing short-lived molecules, such...