Some novel materials that sound too good to be true turn out to be true and good. An emergent class of semiconductors, which could affordably light up our future with nuanced colors emanating from lasers, lamps, and even window glass, could be the latest example. These materials are very radiant, easy to process from solution,…
Common, Cheap, Non-Toxic Elements Used to Synthesize Semiconductors
One of the problems for Javier Vela and the chemists in his Iowa State University research group was that a toxic material worked so well in solar cells. And so any substitute for the lead-containing perovskites used in some solar cells would have to really perform. But what could they find to replace the perovskite…
Nanometer-Thin Layer Improves Semiconductor Efficiency
Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are used as light sources in high-quality smartphone displays and large-area high-end products such as OLED televisions. The main active component in an OLED is a light-emitting layer of an organic semiconductor, which converts electrical energy into visible light. In an OLED, the organic semiconducting layer is situated between two electrodes;…
Doped Semiconductors Offer New Discoveries
A group of physicists from the cfaed at Technische Universitaet Dresden, together with researchers from Japan, were able to demonstrate in a study how the doping of organic semiconductors can be simulated and experimentally verified. The study has now been published in Nature Materials (“Insight into doping efficiency of organic semiconductors from the analysis of…
Simulation and Experiment Help Researchers Study Next-Generation Semiconductors
Nanostructures Made of Previously Impossible Material
Researchers Unlock Gates to Major Semiconductor Discovery
A new progress in the scaling of semiconductor quantum dot-based qubits has been achieved by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China. Professor Guo Guoping with his co-workers, Xiao Ming, Li Haiou, and Cao Gang, designed and fabricated a quantum processor with six quantum dots, and experimentally demonstrated quantum control of the…
Nanomushroom-Coated Sensor Has Endless Possibilities
A small rectangle of pink glass, about the size of a postage stamp, sits on Professor Amy Shen’s desk. Despite its outwardly modest appearance, this little glass slide has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of processes, from monitoring food quality to diagnosing diseases. The slide is made of a “nanoplasmonic” material — its…
A Two-for-One Nanoplatelet Deal
Ultrapowerful computers and sensors need entangled packets of light. Entangled means the packets, or photons, can be in one of two states but are not meaningfully assigned to either state. Scientists found a way to create entangled photons with biexcitons. A biexciton is two pairs of bound electrons and holes. The team showed that ultrathin,…
Revolutionary Hole-Punched Crystal Clears the Way for Quantum Light
Optical highways for light are at the heart of modern communications. But when it comes to guiding individual blips of light called photons, reliable transit is far less common. Now, a collaboration of researchers from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), led by JQI Fellows Mohammad Hafezi and Edo Waks, has created a photonic chip that…
Atomic-Level Rubber Blanket Measures Distortion
Two-dimensional materials such as graphene, which consist of only one or a few atomic layers, have been a very promising aspect of materials science over recent years. They demonstrate remarkable properties that open up completely new technical possibilities, from sensor technology to solar cells. However, there is one important phenomenon that could not be measured…
Promising Semiconductor Zips Data Past Silicon Chips
Imagine creating a material for the digital information highway that allows a fast lane of laser light that zips data past the traditional silicon chips. A multi-institutional team of researchers, led by University of Arkansas engineering professor Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu and a leading Arkansas semiconductor equipment manufacturer, have made significant improvements to a new kind…
Breakthrough in 2-D Semiconductor Crystal Research
A research team from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found the first evidence that a shaking motion in the structure of an atomically thin (2-D) material possesses a naturally occurring circular rotation. This rotation could become the building block for a new form of information technology, and for the…
Diamonds Are a Spintronic Device’s Best Friend
Conventional electronics rely on controlling electric charge. Recently, researchers have been exploring the potential for a new technology, called spintronics, which relies on detecting and controlling a particle’s spin. This technology could lead to new types of more efficient and powerful devices. In a paper published in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, researchers measured…
Semiconductor Discovery is Game-Changer for Organic Solar Cells
In an advance that could push cheap, ubiquitous solar power closer to reality, University of Michigan researchers have found a way to coax electrons to travel much further than was previously thought possible in the materials often used for organic solar cells and other organic semiconductors. “For years, people had treated the poor conductivity of…
Semiconductors Experience Shape-Memory Phenomenon
Researchers have identified a mechanism that triggers shape-memory phenomena in organic crystals used in plastic electronics. Shape-shifting structural materials are made with metal alloys, but the new generation of economical printable plastic electronics is poised to benefit from this phenomenon, too. Shape-memory materials science and plastic electronics technology, when merged, could open the door to…
Brain-Inspired Computing from Breakthrough Semiconductor Interface
One of the big challenges in computer architecture is integrating storage, memory, and processing in one unit. This would make computers faster and more energy efficient. University of Groningen physicists have taken a big step towards this goal by combining a niobium doped strontium titanate (SrTiO3) semiconductor with ferromagnetic cobalt. At the interface, this creates…
Semiconductors Reveal Secrets of their Heat
Researchers are applying the same “hydrodynamic transport model” used to study flow in fluids to explain heat transport in a solid semiconductor, with potential implications for the design of high-speed transistors and lasers. Thermal imaging of tiny nanoscale semiconductor heat sources revealed details about vortices of heat-carrying objects called phonons. The new findings have potentially…
Nanostructured Gate Helps Overcome Semiconductor Obstacles
A nanostructured gate dielectric may have addressed the most significant obstacle to expanding the use of organic semiconductors for thin-film transistors. The structure, composed of a fluoropolymer layer followed by a nanolaminate made from two metal oxide materials, serves as gate dielectric and simultaneously protects the organic semiconductor — which had previously been vulnerable to…
Oxide and Semiconductor Combo Holds Promise for New Electronic Devices
Insulating oxides are oxygen containing compounds that do not conduct electricity, but can sometimes form conductive interfaces when they’re layered together precisely. The conducting electrons at the interface form a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) which boasts exotic quantum properties that make the system potentially useful in electronics and photonics applications. Researchers at Yale University have…
Semiconductor Lasers Surpass Conventional Silicon-Based Systems
A systematic study of a simple and general structure for on-chip semiconductor lasers by A*STAR researchers sets the scene for much broader application of integrated semiconductor lasers beyond conventional silicon-based systems (Applied Optics, “Comparison of III-V/Si on-chip lasers with etched facet reflectors”). The ability to use, manipulate and sense light is applicable to many technologies,…
Novel New Approach for Developing Semiconductors
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology and their team involving researchers of JASRI, Osaka University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, and Nara Institute of Science and Technology have just developed a novel approach to determine and visualize the three-dimensional (3-D) structure of individual dopant atoms using SPring-8. The technique will improve the current understanding of the…
Breakthrough Transistors Inspired by Movement of Ions
Excitons Lured to the Dark Side
To build tomorrow’s quantum computers, some researchers are turning to dark excitons, which are bound pairs of an electron and the absence of an electron called a hole. As a promising quantum bit, or qubit, it can store information in its spin state, analogous to how a regular, classical bit stores information in its off…
Superconductivity Riddle Solved with Stripes
Imagine phones and laptops that never heat up or power grids that never lose energy. This is the dream of scientists working with so-called high-temperature superconductors, which can effortlessly carry electrical currents with no resistance. The first high-temperature superconducting materials, called cuprates, were discovered in the 1980s and would later be the subject of a…