News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Physicists and chemists at the University of Münster (Germany) have jointly succeeded in developing a so-called nano-tomographic technique which is able to detect the typically invisible properties of nano-structured fields in the focus of a lens. Such a method may help to establish nano-structured light landscapes as a tool for material machining, optical tweezers, or high-resolution imaging. The study was published in "Nature Communications".

They can make tiny cell structures visible: cutting-edge light microscopes offer resolutions of a few tenths of a nanometre--in other words, a millionth of a millimeter. Until now, super-resolution microscopes were much slower than conventional methods, because more or finer image data had to be recorded.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan succeeded in clarifying a new synthesis mechanism regarding transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD), which are semiconductor atomic sheets having thickness in atomic order. Because it is difficult to directly observe the aspect of the growing process of TMD in a special environment, the initial growth process remained unclear, and it has been desirable to elucidate a detailed mechanism of synthesis to obtain high-quality TMD.

Rice University engineers have created what may be viewed as the world's smallest incandescent lightbulbs, collections of near-nanoscale materials called 'selective thermal emitters' that absorb heat and emit light. Their research, reported this week in Advanced Materials, could have applications in sensing, photonics and perhaps in computing platforms beyond the limitations of silicon.

To process information, photons must interact. However, these tiny packets of light want nothing to do with each other, each passing by without altering the other. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have coaxed photons into interacting with one another with unprecedented efficiency -- a key advance toward realizing long-awaited quantum optics technologies for computing, communication and remote sensing.