Oct 04, 2024 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The tools used to understand materials at their smallest scales have shaped entire industries. From the semiconductors in smartphones to the advanced materials in medical devices, understanding how materials behave at the atomic level is crucial for designing more efficient, reliable, and powerful technologies. Conductive...
Glimmers of antimatter to explain the ‘dark’ part of the universe
Oct 04, 2024 (Nanowerk News) One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to reveal the nature of dark matter. We know it exists (it constitutes over 85% of the matter in the Universe), but we have never seen it directly and still do not know what it is....
Taking twistronics into new territory
Oct 04, 2024 (Nanowerk News) In 2018, a discovery in materials science sent shock waves throughout the community. A team showed that stacking two layers of graphene at a precise magic angle turned it into a superconductor, says Ritesh Agarwal of the University of Pennsylvania. This sparked the field of...
Engineers create a chip-based tractor beam for biological particles
Oct 04, 2024 (Nanowerk News) MIT researchers have developed a miniature, chip-based “tractor beam,” like the one that captures the Millennium Falcon in the film “Star Wars,” that could someday help biologists and clinicians study DNA, classify cells, and investigate the mechanisms of disease. Small enough to fit in the...
Restoring quantum dot solar cells as if ‘flattening crumpled paper’
Oct 04, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Professor Jongmin Choi’s team from the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at DGIST conducted joint research with Materials Engineering and Convergence Technology Professor Tae Kyung Lee from Gyeongsang National University and Applied Chemistry Professor Younghoon Kim from Kookmin University. The researchers developed a new...
Flexible thermoelectric yarns turn heat into power for wearable devices
Oct 03, 2024 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The ability to capture waste heat and convert it into electricity could transform the way we power everything from industrial systems to wearable electronics. However, traditional thermoelectric materials, which can generate electricity from temperature differences, are often rigid and prone to breaking under stress. This...
Logic with light
Oct 03, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Increasingly complex applications such as artificial intelligence require ever more powerful and power-hungry computers to run. Optical computing is a proposed solution to increase speed and power efficiency but has yet to be realized due to constraints and drawbacks. A new design architecture, called diffraction...
Chiral nanocomposite for highly selective dual-mode sensing and bioimaging of hydrogen sulfide
Oct 03, 2024 (Nanowerk News) With advancements in nanotechnology, scientists have been able to create more artificial chiral nanomaterials. One of the key features of these materials is circular dichroism (CD), which is an optical property used for sensing. CD is more sensitive than many other methods but can’t be...
Nanopillars create tiny openings in the nucleus without damaging cells
Oct 02, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Imagine trying to poke a hole in the yolk of a raw egg without breaking the egg white. It sounds impossible, but researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a technology that performs a similarly delicate task in living cells. They created...
Quantum research paves the way toward efficient, ultra-high-density optical memory storage
Oct 02, 2024 (Nanowerk News) As our digital world generates massive amounts of data — more than 2 quintillion bytes of new content each day — yesterday’s storage technologies are quickly reaching their limits. Optical memory devices, which use light to read and write data, offer the potential of durable,...