Semiconductors

A 2017 theory proposed by Rice University physicists to explain the contradictory behavior of an iron-based high-temperature superconductor is helping solve a puzzle in a different type of unconventional superconductor, the “heavy fermion” compound known as CeCu2Si2. An international team from the U.S., China, Germany, and Canada have reported the findings in the Proceedings of…

Manipulating the flow of energy through superconductors could radically transform technology, perhaps leading to applications such as ultra-fast, highly efficient quantum computers. But these subtle dynamics — including heat dispersion — play out with absurd speed across dizzying subatomic structures. Now, scientists have tracked never-before-seen interactions between electrons and the crystal lattice structure of copper-oxide…

A technique to manipulate electrons with light could bring quantum computing up to room temperature. A team of researchers in Germany and at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how infrared laser pulses can shift electrons between two different states, the classic 1 and 0, in a thin sheet of semiconductor. “Ordinary electronics are in…

Japanese researchers have developed a new method to build large areas of semiconductive material that is just two molecules thick and a total of 4.4 nanometers tall. The films function as thin film transistors, and have potential future applications in flexible electronics or chemical detectors. These thin film transistors are the first example of semiconductive…

Flexible televisions, tablets and phones as well as “truly wearable” smart tech are a step closer thanks to a nanoscale transistor created by researchers at The University of Manchester and Shandong University in China. The international team has developed an ultrafast, nanoscale transistor — known as a thin film transistor, or TFT — made out…

UC Berkeley engineers have built a bright-light emitting device that is millimeters wide and fully transparent when turned off. The light emitting material in this device is a monolayer semiconductor, which is just three atoms thick. The device opens the door to invisible displays on walls and windows – displays that would be bright when…

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have found a more efficient fabricating process to produce semiconductors used in today’s electronic devices. They also confirmed that materials other than silicon can be used successfully in the development process that could increase performance of electronic devices. This fabrication process — the I-MacEtch, or inverse metal-assisted chemical etching…

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,…

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…

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;…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…