News by Subject Technology & Engineering

While the charge and spin properties of electrons are widely utilized in modern day technologies such as transistors and memories, another aspect of the subatomic particle has long remained uncharted. This is the 'valley' property which has potential for realizing a new class of technology termed 'valleytronics' -- similar to electronics (charge) and spintronics (spin). This property arises from the fact that the electrons in the crystal occupy different positions that are quantum mechanically distinct.

Placing a magnet on your refrigerator might hold up your calendar, but researchers from India's Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics found that placing one outside a plasma chamber causes a localized, fireball-like structure. This work may help understand plasma dynamics under these north-south, or dipolar, magnetic fields. They present their results this week in the journal Physics of Plasmas.

An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has demonstrated optical and electronic evidence of semiconductor-to-metallic phase transition when exposed to airborne chemical vapors, and how the behavior can be used to create an entirely new class of chemical vapor sensors.

When certain materials are cooled below a critical temperature they become superconductors, with zero electrical resistance. An international research team observed an unusual electronic state in new superconductor chromium arsenide. This finding could prove useful in future superconductor research and material design. The study was published on June 5 in Nature Communications.

The target of large, cheap and quick graphene synthesis achieved: 5 x 50 cm2 and beyond.

Magnetic quantum objects in superconductors, so-called 'fluxons,' are particularly suitable for the storage and processing of data bits. Physicists around Wolfgang Lang at the University of Vienna and their colleagues at the Johannes-Kepler-University Linz have now succeeded in producing a 'quantum egg-box' with a novel and simple method. They realized a stable and regular arrangement of hundreds of thousands of fluxons.

Two-dimensional materials that can multitask. That is the result of a new process that naturally produces patterned monolayers that can act as a base for creating a wide variety of novel materials with dual optical, magnetic, catalytic or sensing capabilities.