Feature Channels: Materials Science

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The next generation of phones, computers and wearable devices requires materials that can meet extraordinary demands. Engineers and physicists aim to meet these needs by developing new materials that can perform faster while using less energy. During the 65th AVS International Symposium and Exhibition, being held Oct. 21-26, researchers will discuss different techniques, from evaporating germanium to creating strategic voids, to improve the electrical performance of succeeding technologies.

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A new building material developed at Empa is about to be launched on the market: "memory-steel" can not only be used to reinforce new, but also existing concrete structures. When the material is heated (one-time), prestressing occurs automatically. The Empa spin-off re-fer AG is now presenting the material with shape memory in a series of lectures.

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Her research focuses on cylindrical carbon structures with useful properties for energy storage, aircraft components, and other applications.

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As the phones get slimmer, the optics crisper and the processors faster, have you ever wondered what is happening behind the scenes that make these remarkable achievements possible? During the AVS 65th International Symposium and Exhibition, Oct. 21-26, Svetlana Radovanov will discuss the research and development that ultimately are used to create the particle accelerators driving these technological advances.

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Imagine a coating as hard as a diamond and a fraction the thickness of a human hair. Researchers are exploring new approaches to create resilient thin films that could be used in a variety of electronic applications from cutting tools to the aerospace industry. During the 65th AVS International Symposium and Exhibition, being held Oct. 21-26, Grzegorz Greczynski will present a new deposition method that improves the thermal and chemical stability of transition-metal nitride thin-film layers.

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By merging the ancient art of origami with 21st century technology, researchers have created a one-step approach to fabricating complex origami structures whose light weight, expandability, and strength could have applications in everything from biomedical devices to equipment used in space exploration.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Capstone Turbine Corp. have received $380,000 in DOE Technology Commercialization Funding to refine Argonne’s high-efficiency, fast charging/discharging latent heat thermal energy storage system (TESS) for use in building applications and process/manufacturing industries.

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Scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have demonstrated a surprisingly simple way of flipping a material from one state into another, and then back again, with single flashes of laser light.

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AIP Publishing and AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing (AVS) today announced an agreement to publish AVS Quantum Science, a new online interdisciplinary journal. The announcement coincides with the AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition in Long Beach, California, from October 21-26, 2018.

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New studies identify key molecular characteristics to potentially separate rare earth metals cleanly and efficiently with light.

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Precise positioning of oxygens could help engineer faster, more efficient energy-relevant chemical transformations.

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Ames Laboratory has developed a method to measure magnetic properties of superconducting and magnetic materials that exhibit unusual quantum behavior at very low temperatures in high magnetic fields.

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Argonne scientists have identified a new class of topological materials made by inserting transition metal atoms into the atomic lattice of a well-known two-dimensional material.

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Hardware that mimics the neural circuitry of the brain requires building blocks that can adjust how they synapse. One such approach, called memristors, uses current resistance to store this information. New work looks to overcome reliability issues in these devices by scaling memristors to the atomic level. Researchers demonstrated a new type of compound synapse that can achieve synaptic weight programming and conduct vector-matrix multiplication with significant advances over the current state of the art. They discuss their work in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.

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The lead battery is headed for a high-tech makeover that will make this sustainable mainstay product more appealing to the automotive industry and the power grid. Under the terms of a new agreement signed with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, 14 members of the Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium (ALABC) have joined forces with Electric Applications to grapple with some of their common challenges.

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A paper published in Nature Communications by Sufei Shi, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer, increases our understanding of how light interacts with atomically thin semiconductors and creates unique excitonic complex particles, multiple electrons, and holes strongly bound together.

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Sandia National Laboratories has named Mercedes Taylor and Chen Wang its first Jill Hruby Fellows. The honorees have each been awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in technical leadership, comprising national security-relevant research with an executive mentor.

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A novel technique that nudges single atoms to switch places within an atomically thin material could bring scientists another step closer to realizing theoretical physicist Richard Feynman’s vision of building tiny machines from the atom up.

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A new solid polymer electrolyte may help make cell phone batteries store more energy and last longer.

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Egyptian blue, derived from calcium copper silicate, was routinely used on ancient depictions of gods and royalty. Previous studies have shown that when Egyptian blue absorbs visible light, it then emits light in the near-infrared range. Now a team led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has confirmed the pigment's fluorescence can be 10 times stronger than previously thought.

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TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre, is pleased to launch its new Five-Year Plan 2020-2025, developed with extensive internal and external community consultation. It leverages past investments by government and builds on the laboratory’s strong brand and global network to deliver a new level of top-tier science, training, and innovation to Canada for decades to come.

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The American Physical Society (APS), the world’s largest physics organization, has elected three scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory as 2018 APS fellows.

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Researchers have successfully incorporated “photosensitizers” into a range of polymers, giving those materials the ability to render bacteria and viruses inactive using only ambient oxygen and visible-wavelength light.

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Argonne recently held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the expanded Cell Analysis, Modeling and Prototyping (CAMP) facility.

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Lab-on-a-chip devices harness electrical signals to measure glucose, tell apart blood type and detect viruses or cancer. But biological samples need hafnium oxide for protection from the electric fields.

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When bridges, dam walls and concrete foundations form cracks, AAR is often the culprit: the alkali-aggregate reaction. It causes the concrete to swell and renders renova-tions or even reconstructions necessary. A project funded by the Swiss National Sci-ence Foundation (SNSF) and coordinated by Empa is studying the “concrete disease”.

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Thanks to research universities like UAH, Alabama is enjoying an unprecedented ramp up in its bioscience industry.

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Fuel cells have long been viewed as a promising power source. But most fuel cells are too expensive, inefficient, or both. In a new approach, inspired by biology, a University of Wisconsin–Madison team has designed a fuel cell using cheaper materials and an organic compound that shuttles electrons and protons.

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Observation could help scientists find the universal key ingredient in the recipe for high-temperature superconductivity.

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Computers in the future could be more energy-efficient, thanks to new research from Binghamton University, State University at New York.

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Columbia Engineers have created the first flat lens capable of correctly focusing a large range of colors of any polarization to the same focal spot without the need for any additional elements. Only a micron thick, their revolutionary "flat" lens is much thinner than a sheet of paper and offers performance comparable to top-of-the-line compound lens systems. UPenn nanophotonics expert Nader Engheta, who was not involved with this study, notes: "This…is an exciting development in the field of flat optics.”

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As part of a new program, Argonne’s researchers are evaluating what it takes to power drones with batteries.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute has taken a major step toward printed, aligned anisotropic magnets via additive manufacturing processes.

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For 12 months, UAB physics graduate student Ashlyn Burch will work at Sandia National Laboratory, high in the semi-arid Western city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, supported by a U.S. Department of Energy Science Graduate Student Research award.

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Scientists have developed a new catalyst for breaking carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest chemical bonds known. The discovery is a breakthrough for efforts in environmental remediation and chemical synthesis.

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Argonne’s sequential infiltration synthesis technique could advance computer chip manufacturing as well as other industries.

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ORNL story tips: Recycled hard drives give magnets new life in motors; new organ-on-a-chip design to test radiation effects on cells that mimic breathing; supercomputers analyze molecules that could increase yield of certain rare earth elements important for energy applications

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A chemistry professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received $188,863 from the National Science Foundation to study experimental methods of developing organic optoelectronic materials. Dr. Noureen Siraj, assistant professor of analytical and physical chemistry, will work with the Center of Organic Photonics and Electronics at the Georgia Institute of Technology to characterize new materials developed at UA Little Rock that possess Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) characteristics. FRET is a radiation-free energy transfer process between chemical compounds.

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Scientists unlock mystery that could help reduce emissions of fine particles from combustion engines and other sources.

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Columbia Engineers have invented a high-performance exterior PDRC polymer coating with nano-to-microscale air voids that acts as a spontaneous air cooler and can be fabricated, dyed, and applied like paint on rooftops, buildings, water tanks, vehicles, even spacecraft--anything that can be painted. They used a solution-based phase-inversion technique that gives the polymer a porous foam-like structure.

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Through New Mexico Small Business Assistance, Sandia is solving technical challenges to help one company reconfigure an old ethanol plant and, in a separate project, helping a cohort of companies characterize new composite materials made from forest slash.

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New work looks to understand how iron oxide nanoparticles age, and how aging may change their functional or safety profiles. By combining lab-based Mössbauer spectroscopy with “center of gravity” analysis, researchers can quantify the diffusive oxidation of magnetite into maghemite, and track the process. In Applied Physics Letters, the work is poised to help understand the aging mechanisms in nanomaterials, and how these effects change the way they interact with the human body.

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The Department of Energy today announced the first round of awardees for the new HPC4Materials (HPC4Mtls) Program, a public-private effort aimed at using high-performance computing to advance U.S. industry’s discovery, design and development of materials for severe environments.

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Argonne will receive more than $11 million in funding over three years as part of a series of grants tied to quantum information science.

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The Advanced Light Source (ALS), a scientific user facility at Berkeley Lab, has received federal approval to proceed with preliminary design, planning and R&D work for a major upgrade project that will boost the brightness of its X-ray beams at least a hundredfold. The upgrade will give the ALS, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary, brighter beams with a more ordered structure – like evenly spaced ripples in a pond – that will better reveal nanoscale details in complex chemical reactions and in new materials, expanding the envelope for scientific exploration.

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A unique combination of imaging tools and atomic-level simulations has allowed a team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to solve a longstanding debate about the properties of a promising material that can harvest energy from light.

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Scientists report that treatment with a superacid causes boron nitride layers to separate into atomically thick sheets, while creating binding sites on the surface of these sheets that provide opportunities to interface with nanoparticles, molecules and other 2D nanomaterials, like graphene.

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Argonne scientists hope that tiny vortices, driven by various magnetic fields, will be able to move microscopic particles.

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Scientists at the University of Notre Dame will begin an independent study of turnout gear worn by firefighters after initial samples tested positive for fluorine.

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Anyone who spends most of their day indoors knows the importance of a comfortable atmosphere to work and live in. Researchers from EPFL's Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory are searching for ways to maximize the energy gain from a building's envelope while also optimizing interior comfort in an environmentally friendly way. They are demonstrating how this can be done with "SolAce", the latest unit in Empa and Eawag's NEST research building.