Guiding the design of silicon devices with improved efficiency

Aug 23, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Silicon is one of the most pervasive functional materials of the modern age, underpinning semiconductor technologies ranging from microelectronics to solar cells. Indeed, silicon transistors enable computing applications from cell phones to supercomputers, while silicon photovoltaics are the most widely deployed solar-cell technology to date....

Listening to nanoscale earthquakes

Aug 23, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A recent UNSW-led paper published in Nature Communications ("Crackling noise microscopy") presents an exciting new way to listen to avalanches of atoms in crystals. The nanoscale movement of atoms when materials deform leads to sound emission. This so-called crackling noise is a scale-invariant phenomenon found...