Better understanding plastics underlying chemistry may revolutionize how we use these ubiquitous materials
DOE/US Department of Energy
Too much natural gas. A small adjustment to an experiment. These ingredients came together to produce one of the most influential materials ever invented.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab s Molecular Foundry user facility developed a polymer that they can break down and recreate. It could lead to cyclical plastics that can be recycled over and over again.
Image courtesy of Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab
In the wake of World War II, companies were left with excess fossil fuels with no war to consume them. Looking to turn extra natural gas into liquid fuel, the Philips Petroleum Company hired chemists J. Paul Hogan and Robert L. Banks. As they experimented with turning natural gas into gasoline, they tweaked their catalyst - a material used to speed up chemical reactions. They expected it would make a liquid. Instead, the process produced something enti
Light-Induced Lattice Twisting can Photogenerate Giant Electric Current
Written by AZoOpticsJan 20 2021
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy s Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless.
The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.
Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure of the material that protects the electrons from doing so.
DOE awarding more than $50M to 15 projects to advance critical material innovations
The US Department of Energy (DOE) is awarding more than $50 million in funding for 15 projects focused on field validation and demonstration as well as next-generation extraction, separation, and processing technologies for critical materials.
Critical materials are used in many products important to the US economy and energy technologies, such as rare-earth elements used to manufacture high-strength magnets for offshore wind-turbine generators and lithium and cobalt in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
Projects selected under this funding opportunity announcement will reduce both the costs of critical materials and the environmental impacts of production. The projects are divided into two main topic areas:
Nearly Dissipationless Current Achieved Through Light-Induced Switch | Research & Technology | Jan 2021 photonics.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from photonics.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Posted Jan 19, 2021 10:18 am This illustration shows light at trillions of pulses per second (red flash) accessing and controlling Higgs modes (gold balls) in an iron-based superconductor. Even at different energy bands, the Higgs modes interact with each other (white smoke). Larger image.
Illustration courtesy of Jigang Wang. AMES, Iowa – Even if you weren’t a physics major, you’ve probably heard something about the Higgs boson. There was the title of a 1993 book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that dubbed the Higgs “The God Particle.” There was the search for the Higgs particle that launched after 2009’s first collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. There was the 2013 announcement that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently theorizing in 1964 that a fundamental particle – the Higgs – is the source of mass in subatomic particles, making the universe as we know it possible.