From Mother Nature to our must-have devices, we're surrounded by crystals. Those courtesy of the former, such as ice and snow, can form spontaneously and symmetrically. But the silicon-based or gallium nitride crystals found in LEDs and other electronics...
Computers can beat chess champions, simulate star explosions, and forecast global climate. We are even teaching them to be infallible problem-solvers and fast learners.
And now, physicists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their...
"Only connect"--E. M. Forster's pithy quotation captures an essential feature of any society, human or animal: the patterns of interactions among individuals out of which collective behaviors arise. By developing a system that allows automated, in-depth monitoring of the...
To see what is driving the exotic behavior in some atomically thin - or 2-D - materials, and find out what happens when they are stacked like Lego bricks in different combinations with other ultrathin materials, scientists want to...
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an energy-efficient recycling process that restores used cathodes from spent lithium ion batteries and makes them work just as good as new. The process involves harvesting the degraded cathode...
While there is a growing market for organic solar cells - they contain materials that are cheaper, more abundant, and more environmentally friendly than those used in typical solar panels - they also tend to be less efficient in...
An international team of scientists has produced the first high-powered, randomly polarised laser beam with a "Q switch" laser, which typically emits pulses of light so brief that they're measured in nanoseconds.
Lasers are a critical part of modern technology--they're...
In the original Star Wars film, R2D2 projects an image of Princess Leia in distress. The iconic scene includes the line still famous 40 years later: "Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."
BYU electrical and computer engineering...
Physicists have developed a technique based on optical microscopy that can be used to create images of atoms on the nanoscale. In particular, the new method allows the imaging of quantum dots in a semiconductor chip. Together with colleagues...
Researchers at Oregon State University have designed and fabricated the world's smallest electro-optic modulator, which could mean major reductions in energy used by data centers and supercomputers.
An electro-optic modulator plays the key role in fiber optic networks. Just as...
New model connects the origins of very high-energy neutrinos, ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, and high-energy gamma rays with black-hole jets embedded in their environments.
One of the biggest mysteries in astroparticle physics has been the origins of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, very...
