Tremendous progress of organic solar cells (OSCs) has been exemplified by the use of non-fullerene electron acceptors (NFAs) in the past few years. Compared with fullerene derivative acceptors, NFAs show a multitude of advantages including tunable energy levels, broad absorption spectrum and strong light absorption ability, as well as high carrier mobility. To further improve…
Discovering Unusual Structures From Exception Using Big Data and Machine Learning Techniques
Machine learning (ML) has found wide application in materials science. It is believed that a model developed by ML could depict the common trend of the data and therefore reflect the relationship between structure and property, which can be applied to most of the compounds. So, by training ML models with existed databases, important properties…
A New Iron-Based Superconductor Stabilized by Inter-Block Charger Transfer
Iron-based superconductors (IBSCs) have attracted sustained research attention over the past decade, partly because new IBSCs were discovered one after another in the earlier years. At the time being, however, exploration of IBSCs becomes more and more challenging. A research team from Zhejiang University developed a structural design strategy for the exploration (H. Jiang et…
Compositional Design of Multi-Component Alloys by High-Throughput Screening
Recently, multi-component materials have become one of the most promising materials in the engineering and biomedical applications. Compared with traditional alloys, the composition design of multi-component materials is more complicated, and lots of alloys with different compositions need to be prepared and tested. In addition, the relationship between the mixing entropy and performance of multi-component…
Manipulating the Crystallization and Assembly of Materials in Solution by Marangoni Flow
Solution-based approaches are widely used for crystal growth and material assembly. In the solution-based processes, inherent fluid flows always present. Recently, researchers at Peking University developed a general strategy for the regulation of crystal growth and material assembly by utilizing these fluid flows. They are able to control the mass transfer process during the growth…
Researchers Explore Record Growth of Graphene Single Crystals
Graphene, especially the graphene single crystal, is a star material for future photonics and electronics due to its unique properties, such as giant intrinsic charge carrier mobility, record thermal conductivity, super stiffness and excellent light transmission. However, whether graphene can live up to the expectation depends on reliable, high-quality synthesis with high efficiency. Recently, one…
Semiconductor: A New Contender for Scalable Quantum Computing
Quantum computing, along with 5G and AI, has been the focus for next-generation technology in the last few decades. Up to now, numerous physical systems have been investigated to build a test device for quantum computing, including superconducting Josephson junctions, trapped ions and semiconductors. Among them, the semiconductor is a new star for its high…
New Record: Over 16 Percent Efficiency for Single-Junction Organic Solar Cells
As a promising technology for renewable energy, organic solar cells (OSCs) have attracted particular interest from both industrial and academic communities. One of the main challenges to promote practical applications of OSCs is their less competitive power conversion efficiency than that of the counterpart photovoltaic technologies such as inorganic silicon, CIGS, or perovskite solar cells.…
Pressure Helps to Make Better Li-Ion Batteries
Rechargeable Li-ion batteries are crucial parts for home electronics and portable devices such as cell phones and laptops. One can imagine how the life we have today would be like without cell phones and internet. Li-ion batteries (LIBs) are also growing in popularity for electric vehicle which can help to highly reduce the emission of…
Flow Units: Dynamic Defects in Metallic Glasses
In a crystal, structural defects such as dislocations or twins are well defined and largely determine the mechanical and other properties. These defects can be easily identified as the broken long-range atomic order. However, the lack of a periodic microstructure makes the searching of similar structural defects a difficult task in amorphous materials. Recent studies…
Tianhe-2 Supercomputer Works Out the Criterion for Quantum Supremacy
Quantum supremacy refers to the super strong calculation capacity of a quantum computer to surpass that of any classical computer. So far, such a quantum computer has not been physically made, but as with the rapid development of quantum technologies in recent years, the voice for pursuing the superiority by quantum computing is more loudly…
Rationalizing Phonon Dispersion: An Efficient and Precise Prediction of Lattice Thermal Conductivity
Lattice thermal conductivity strongly affects the applications of materials related to thermal functionality, such as thermal management, thermal barrier coatings and thermoelectrics. In order to understand the lattice thermal conductivity more quantitatively and in a time- and cost-effective way, many researchers devoted their efforts and developed a few physical models using approximated phonon dispersions over…
Scientists Pinpoint the Key Mechanism Foe Amplification of Global Warming
Biomimetic Micro/Nanoscale Fiber Reinforced Composites
Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the magical nature has given birth to a myriad of biological materials which serve either as the skeletons of the organisms or as defensive or offensive weapons. Although these natural structural materials are derived from relatively sterile natural components, such as fragile minerals and ductile biopolymers, they…
A Smart Safe Rechargeable Zinc Ion Battery Based on Sol-Gel Transition Electrolytes
The thermal runaway issue has been a long-standing obstacle impeding the development of high energy density and high power delivery batteries. These batteries would generate a lot of heat in ultrafast charge/discharge process or hazardous conditions, such as overcharging and short-circuit. To dissipate the heat accumulated in the batteries, physical safety designs such as fused…
Mystery of Phase Change in Sub-Nanosecond-Octahedra Structure Motif
The Deformation and Mechanics of One-Atom Thin Layer Materials
In terms of the attention that graphene has been received in the past decade, no single material is comparable. As the interest and enthusiasm in graphene research continue, it calls for critical examination on the reliability and durability of graphene-enabled applications; the mechanics of graphene hence becomes essential to address related issues. In practice, defects…
A Novel Voltage Peak in the Metal Nanowire-Superconductor Hybrid Structure
Superconductivity, known as a quantum state with zero resistance and perfect diamagnetism, has attracted great attention in physical science. Due to the quantum size effect, low dimensional superconducting systems can exhibit novel behaviors different from bulk situation. Particularly, the investigations on strong spin-orbit coupling or ferromagnetic nanowires with superconducting contacts have become a research highlight…
A New Non-Destructive Technique to Detect Single Quantum Level Phonons
The precision measurement of photons, the smallest energy quanta of mechanics, has always been the main constraint to the development of quantum applications, such as quantum computation and quantum communication. A recent study has shown that a well-designed optomechanical device (see figure) can non-destructively detect phonon signals of a wide range of frequencies and in…
The World’s First All-Si Laser
Integrated Si photonics incorporates the essence of the two pillar industries of “microelectronics” and “optoelectronics”, which is expected to bring new technological revolution in a variety of fields such as communication, sensing, lighting, dispalay, imaging, detection, etc. Si lasers are the key to achieve integrated Si photonics. However, the optical gains of Si are lower…
Exploring the Realistic Nature of the Wave Function in Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a pillar of modern science and technology, and has benefited the human society for a century. The wave function, also known as the quantum state, is the description of a quantum object and plays a central role in quantum mechanics. Despite this importance, it still remains in debate what the nature of…
Activity Descriptors for Electrocatalysts in Energy Storage Applications
Under the environmental concerns such as pollution and greenhouse effect, environment-friendly energy storage applications such as fuel cells, ammonia production and lithium-air batteries are proposed to replace fossil resources. However, the high overpotential is one of the most urgent issues for the practical applications and electrocatalysts are applied to lower overpotential. There are some challenges…
Perovskite Solar Cells Go Single Crystal
Photovoltaic conversion is regarded as the ultimate solution to the mankind’s ever growing demand for energy, yet the traditional silicon-based solar cells are expensive to produce, and the production itself involves intensive energy consumption. The emerging hybrid organic-inorganic solar cells based on perovskite CH3NH3PbI3, on the other hand, are not only inexpensive to process but…
A.I. Helps to Fight Against Lung Cancer
Currently, lung cancer has become one of the most deadly cancers. In contrast to the steady increase in survival for most cancers, advances have been slow for lung cancer. Commonly, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer patients is merely 16%, which will rise to 52% if lung cancer is diagnosed at early stages. However,…
Artificial Transpiration for Solar Water Purification
Recently, solar steam and vapor generation is attracting a lot of attention with promising prospects in desalination, sterilization and chemical purification. Tremendous progress has been achieved as absorber designs and thermal management. However, in all the previous designs, because of the minimized optical loss and heat conduction loss, losses related to convection and conduction start to…