Controlled Environments

These are the journeys of the “StarChip Wafersize.” UC Santa Barbara students sent up, via balloon, a prototype miniature spacecraft that might eventually become the “wafercraft” that researchers posit could be propelled by lasers to achieve space travel at relativistic speeds to reach nearby star systems and exoplanets. So begins a journey, funded by NASA…

Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used giant lasers to flash-freeze water into its exotic superionic phase and record X-ray diffraction patterns to identify its atomic structure for the very first time—all in just a few billionths of a second. The findings are reported in Nature. In 1988, scientists first predicted that water would…

Graphene is celebrated as an extraordinary material. It consists of pure carbon, only a single atomic layer thick. Nevertheless, it is extremely stable, strong, and even conductive. For electronics, however, graphene still has crucial disadvantages. It cannot be used as a semiconductor, since it has no bandgap. By sticking hydrogen atoms to graphene such a…

Expiration dates on milk could eventually become a thing of the past with new sensor technology from Washington State University scientists. Researchers from the Department of Biological Systems Engineering (BSE), the WSU/UI School of Food Science and other departments have developed a sensor that can “smell” if milk is still good or has gone bad.…

When you read about electrifying art, “electrifying” isn’t usually a verb. But an artist working with a Rice University lab is in fact making artwork that can deliver a jolt. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour introduced laser-induced graphene (LIG) to the world in 2014, and now the researchers are making art with the…

A novel material that consists of a single sheet of carbon atoms could lead to new designs for optical quantum computers. Physicists from the University of Vienna and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona have shown that tailored graphene structures enable single photons to interact with each other. The proposed new architecture for quantum…

For the first time, physicists at the University of Basel have succeeded in measuring the magnetic properties of atomically thin van der Waals materials on the nanoscale. They used diamond quantum sensors to determine the strength of the magnetization of individual atomic layers of the material chromium triiodide. In addition, they found a long-sought explanation…

A new 3-D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation tool developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CEA Saclay is enabling cutting-edge simulations of laser/plasma coupling mechanisms that were previously out of reach of standard PIC codes used in plasma research. More detailed understanding of these mechanisms is critical to the development of ultra-compact particle accelerators…

You’ve never heard Dean Martin like this. This recording of Martin’s classic “Volare” was transmitted wirelessly via a semiconductor laser—the first time a laser has been used as a radio frequency transmitter. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering…

A more efficient and cost-effective way to detect lanthanides, the rare earth metals used in smartphones and other technologies, could be possible with a new protein-based sensor that changes its fluorescence when it binds to these metals. A team of researchers from Penn State developed the sensor from a protein they recently described and subsequently…

A pair of researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) describes a way of making a submicron-sized cylinder disappear without using any specialized coating. Their findings could enable invisibility of natural materials at optical frequency and eventually lead to a simpler way of enhancing optoelectronic devices, including sensing and communication technologies. Making objects invisible…

Threading a needle is hard, but at least you can see it. Think about how challenging it must be to thread a screw through a rod inside a bone in someone’s leg. Rice University seniors at the Brown School of Engineering set out to help doctors simplify the process of repairing fractured long bones in…

For the first time, Yale University physicists have directly observed quantum behavior in the vibrations of a liquid body. A great deal of ongoing research is currently devoted to discovering and exploiting quantum effects in the motion of macroscopic objects made of solids and gases. This new experiment opens a potentially rich area of further…

National University of Singapore (NUS) physicists have discovered that recovered carbon black powder can be transformed by laser treatment to give a wide range of colors for potential display applications. Recovered carbon black powder is a common pigment produced from scrap rubber tires. There is a growing demand to use it as an environmentally friendly…

Through magic twist angles and unique energy states, it is possible to design tailor-made, atomically thin materials that could be invaluable for future electronics. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Regensburg University in Germany have shed light on the ultrafast dynamics in these novel materials. The results were recently published in the…