Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The field of thermoelectric materials has long sought to harness waste heat and convert it into useful electricity. This technology holds immense potential for improving energy efficiency across numerous industries and applications. However, developing materials that can effectively convert heat to electricity, especially at high...
New method developed for measuring thermal expansion in atomically thin materials
Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Advanced materials, including two-dimensional or atomically thin materials just a few atoms thick, are essential for the future of microelectronics technology. Now a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a way to directly measure such materials’ thermal expansion coefficient, the rate at which...
Soft, stretchy electrode simulates touch sensations using electrical signals
Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego has developed a soft, stretchy electronic device capable of simulating the feeling of pressure or vibration when worn on the skin. This device, reported in a paper published in Science Robotics ("Conductive block...
Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists
Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes. An international team, led by Penn State researchers,...
Engineers pioneer mass production of quantum dot lasers for optical communications
Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) South Korean researchers have developed technology to mass-produce quantum dot lasers, widely used in data centers and quantum communications. This breakthrough could reduce semiconductor laser production costs to one-sixth of their current level. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that they have, for...
Studying thin films under extreme temperatures with reflectometry
Jun 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) A team of researchers from ANSTO and University of Technology Sydney have set a record by conducting thin film experiments at 1100 °C, using the Spatz reflectometer equipped with a vacuum furnace. The unique combination of neutron reflectometry with high temperature apparatus enables atomic-scale insights...
An optical lens that senses gas
Jun 26, 2024 (Nanowerk News) A research team from the University of Jena has developed a small optical lens, only a few millimetres in size, whose refractive behaviour changes in the presence of gas. As reported by the researchers in the journal Nature Communications ("Micro-optical elements from optical-quality ZIF-62 hybrid...
A chip-scale titanium-sapphire laser
Jun 26, 2024 (Nanowerk News) As lasers go, those made of Titanium-sapphire (Ti:sapphire) are considered to have “unmatched” performance. They are indispensable in many fields, including cutting-edge quantum optics, spectroscopy, and neuroscience. But that performance comes at a steep price. Ti:sapphire lasers are big, on the order of cubic feet...
Light-controlled artificial maple seeds could monitor the environment even in hard-to-reach locations
Jun 27, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from Tampere University, Finland, and the University of Pittsburgh, USA, have developed a tiny robot replicating the aerial dance of falling maple seeds. In the future, this robot could be used for real-time environmental monitoring or delivery of small samples even in inaccessible terrain...
Fundamental spatial limits of all-optical magnetization switching
Jun 27, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Magnetization can be switched with a single laser pulse. However, it is not known whether the underlying microscopic process is scalable to the nanometer length scale, a prerequisite for making this technology competitive for future data storage applications. Researchers at the Max Born Institute in...