Optimizing the charge transfer pathway of dopant ions through heterojunction design is a powerful strategy for enhancing semiconductor luminescence. In this context, Dengfeng Peng's group at Shenzhen University developed a high-performance CaF₂/CaZnOS heterojunction mechanoluminescent (ML) material. By precisely controlling the CaF₂-to-CaZnOS ratio, they constructed an efficient heterojunction structure that significantly boosted ML performance. By doping these heterojunctions with lanthanide ions such as Tb³⁺, Pr³⁺, and Yb³⁺, the team has demonstrated highly efficient down-conversion, transforming single energy photons into multiple low-energy photons. This innovation takes advantage of the unique interfacial properties of heterojunction to produce strong luminescence under mechanical stress, offering a promising path toward passive, energy-saving light sources. Moreover, the system achieves quantum cutting, a process that converts one high-energy photon into several lower-energy photons, greatly enhancing luminous efficiency. These advanced heterojunction materials, with their down-conversion-enhanced ML, open new possibilities for a wide range of luminescence-based applications.

High-temperature shock (HTS) successfully converts copper foil into a single-atom copper catalyst within just 0.5 seconds, reaching a reaction temperature of 1700 K and achieving a copper content of 0.54 wt%. This provides a novel and effective method to prevent the aggregation of single atoms and maintain their dispersion.

Water reshapes the Earth through slow, powerful erosion, carving intricate landscapes like caves and pinnacles in soluble rocks such as limestone. An international team from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the University of Florida, and the Institute of Earth Sciences in Orléans has discovered that vertical channels, known as karstic solution pipes, preserve a record of Earth’s climatic history. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals that these pipes evolve with time into an invariant shape, a fixed, ideal form that remains unchanged as the pipes deepen, encoding ancient rainfall patterns.