Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory made the first observations of waves of atomic rearrangements, known as phasons, propagating supersonically through a vibrating crystal lattice — a discovery that may dramatically improve heat transport in insulators and enable new strategies for heat management in future electronics devices. “The discovery gives you…

A scientific team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a new way to take the local temperature of a material from an area about a billionth of a meter wide, or approximately 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. This discovery, published in Physical Review Letters, promises to improve…

A new way to grow narrow ribbons of graphene, a lightweight and strong structure of single-atom-thick carbon atoms linked into hexagons, may address a shortcoming that has prevented the material from achieving its full potential in electronic applications. Graphene nanoribbons, mere billionths of a meter wide, exhibit different electronic properties than two-dimensional sheets of the…

The lighter wand for your gas BBQ, a submarine’s sonar device, and the ultrasound machine at your doctor’s office all rely on piezoelectric materials, which turn mechanical stress into electrical energy, and vice versa. In 1997, researchers developed piezoelectric materials that were 10 times better at coupling electrical and mechanical responses than prior state-of-the-art materials.…