/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Atoms in crystalline solids sometimes vibrate in unison, giving rise to emergent phenomena known as phonons. Because these collective vibrations set the pace for how heat and energy move through materials, they play a central role in devices that capture or emit light, like solar cells and LEDs. /news/2025-09-nanoscale-slots-enable-room-temperature.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:46:03 EDT news678469561 In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. /news/2025-09-dark-valleytronics-excitons-atomically-thin.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 25 Sep 2025 09:21:31 EDT news678010886 Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, together with international collaborators, have developed a new electron microscopy method that has enabled the first-ever imaging of vibrations, or phonons, in specific directions at the atomic scale. /news/2025-09-image-atomic-vibrations.html Condensed Matter Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:11:57 EDT news677502711 While many plans for quantum computers transmit data using the particles of light known as photons, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) are turning to sound. /news/2025-09-tomorrow-quantum.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:28:04 EDT news677417282 Copper selenide (Cuâ‚‚Se) attracts scientific interest for its thermoelectric ability to convert heat into electricity, but a lack of atomic-level understanding has limited its practical applications for decades. /news/2025-09-conquering-disorder-solid-liquid-ion.html Condensed Matter Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:40:03 EDT news677331192 Caltech scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI)–based method that dramatically speeds up calculations of the quantum interactions that take place in materials. In new work, the group focuses on interactions among atomic vibrations, or phonons—interactions that govern a wide range of material properties, including heat transport, thermal expansion, and phase transitions. The new machine learning approach could be extended to compute all quantum interactions, potentially enabling encyclopedic knowledge about how particles and excitations behave in materials. /news/2025-09-machine-unravels-quantum-atomic-vibrations.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:16:03 EDT news677254561 A new study has successfully demonstrated the confinement of terahertz (THz) light to nanoscale dimensions using a new type of layered material. This could lead to improvements in optoelectronic devices such as infrared emitters used in remote controls and night vision and terahertz optics desired for physical security and environmental sensing. /news/2025-09-layered-material-successfully-confines-terahertz.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:19:04 EDT news677175541 Cornell Engineering researchers have demonstrated that, by zapping a synthetic thin film with ultrafast pulses of low-frequency infrared light, they can cause its lattice to atomically expand and contract billions of times per second—strain-driven "breathing" that could potentially be harnessed to quickly switch a material's electronic, magnetic or optical properties on and off. /news/2025-09-ultrafast-infrared-pulses-trigger-rapid.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:50:04 EDT news677161148 Over the past decades, many research teams worldwide have been trying to detect dark matter, an elusive type of matter that does not emit, reflect or absorb light, using a variety of highly sensitive detectors. Ultimately, these detectors should be able to pick up the very small signals that would indicate the presence of dark matter or its weak interactions with regular matter. /news/2025-09-qrocodile-advances-dark-superconducting-nanowire.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Sep 2025 07:00:01 EDT news676721768 Spintronics is an emerging field that leverages the spin, or the intrinsic angular momentum, of electrons. By harnessing this quantum-relativistic property, researchers aim to develop devices that store and transmit information faster, more efficiently, and at higher data densities, potentially making devices much smaller than what is possible today. These advances could drive next-generation memory, sensors, and even quantum technologies. /news/2025-09-advanced-ray-technique-enables-magnon.html Condensed Matter Wed, 10 Sep 2025 12:39:06 EDT news676726742 Quantum computers promise enormous computational power, but the nature of quantum states makes computation and data inherently "noisy." Rice University computer scientists have developed algorithms that account for noise that is not just random but malicious. Their work could help make quantum computers more accurate and dependable. /news/2025-09-algorithms-malicious-noise-result-accurate.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:24:04 EDT news676131841 A research team from Aarhus University, Denmark, has measured and explained the exceptionally low thermal conductivity of the crystalline material AgGaGe3Se8. Despite its ordered structure, the material behaves like a glass in terms of heat transport—making it one of the least heat-conductive crystalline solids known to date. /news/2025-09-crystalline-material-worse-glass.html Condensed Matter Wed, 03 Sep 2025 10:00:01 EDT news676112118 In their quest to explore and characterize high-temperature superconductors, physicists have mostly focused on a material that is not the absolute highest. That's because that crystal is much easier to split into uniform, easily measurable samples. But in 2024, researchers found a way to grow good crystals that are very similar to the highest temperature superconductor. /news/2025-08-uncovering-mysteries-high-temperature-cuprate.html Superconductivity Fri, 29 Aug 2025 09:52:45 EDT news675679960 A line of engineering research seeks to develop computers that can tackle a class of challenges called combinatorial optimization problems. These are common in real-world applications such as arranging telecommunications, scheduling, and travel routing to maximize efficiency. /news/2025-08-physics-architecture-complex-optimization-problems.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:50:01 EDT news675135731 A study conducted by researchers from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Â鶹ÒùÔºics (CIOMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has demonstrated how nitrogen vacancies (VN) resolve asymmetric carrier injection in GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs), providing a practical way to improve device efficiency. /news/2025-08-defect-carrier-gan-based.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Thu, 21 Aug 2025 11:12:02 EDT news674993521 Electricity flows through wires to deliver power, but it loses energy as it moves, delivering less than it started with. But that energy loss isn't a given. Scientists at Penn State have found a new way to identify types of materials known as superconductors that allow power to travel without any resistance, meaning no energy is lost. /news/2025-08-theory-reveal-superconducting-materials.html Condensed Matter Superconductivity Fri, 15 Aug 2025 13:37:04 EDT news674483821 Using new techniques, Yale researchers have demonstrated the ability to use lasers to cool quantized vibrations of sound within massive objects to their quantum ground state, the lowest energy allowable by quantum mechanics. This breakthrough could benefit communications, quantum computing, and other applications. The results are published in Nature Â鶹ÒùÔºics. /news/2025-08-lasers-crystal-vibrations-quantum-ground.html Optics & Photonics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Fri, 15 Aug 2025 12:30:00 EDT news674479790 In a new study published in Nature Â鶹ÒùÔºics, scientists have achieved the first experimental observation of phonon angular momentum in chiral crystals. /news/2025-08-scientists-phonon-angular-momentum-chiral.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:00:09 EDT news674383921 While conventional computers store information in the form of bits, fundamental pieces of logic that take a value of either 0 or 1, quantum computers are based on qubits. These can have a state that is simultaneously both 0 and 1. This odd property, a quirk of quantum physics known as superposition, lies at the heart of quantum computing's promise to ultimately solve problems that are intractable for classical computers. /news/2025-08-quantum-longer.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:59:56 EDT news674308789 Just as overlapping ripples on a pond can amplify or cancel each other out, waves of many kinds—including light, sound and atomic vibrations—can interfere with one another. At the quantum level, this kind of interference powers high-precision sensors and could be harnessed for quantum computing. /news/2025-08-powerful-quantum-paves-phonon-based.html Condensed Matter Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Mon, 11 Aug 2025 14:39:04 EDT news674141941 A team of physicists has discovered a method to temporarily halt the ultrafast melting of silicon using a carefully timed sequence of laser pulses. This finding opens new possibilities for controlling material behavior under extreme conditions and could improve the accuracy of experiments that study how energy moves through solids. /news/2025-08-scientists-ultrafast-silicon-precisely-laser.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:48:01 EDT news673771677 A research team in Korea has experimentally demonstrated, for the first time in the world, a nonlinear wave phenomenon that changes its frequency—either rising or falling—depending on which direction the waves come from. /news/2025-07-bidirectional-asymmetric-frequency-conversion.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:00:24 EDT news672656419 A new theory-guided framework could help scientists probe the properties of new semiconductors for next-generation microelectronic devices, or discover materials that boost the performance of quantum computers. /news/2025-07-theory-strategy-scope-quantum-interactions.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:49:54 EDT news672565788 A new study published in Science Advances by researchers from the National Graphene Institute at University of Manchester and the University of Oviedo, has revealed a previously unseen behavior of light in gypsum, a mineral better known for its use in building plaster and chalk. /news/2025-07-behavior-gypsum.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Mon, 21 Jul 2025 11:25:10 EDT news672315906 Researchers are creating new moiré materials at the nanometer scale using advanced DNA nanotechnology. DNA moiré superlattices form when two periodic DNA lattices are overlaid with a slight rotational twist or positional offset. This creates a new, larger interference pattern with completely different physical properties. /news/2025-07-programmable-dna-moir-superlattices-material.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Thu, 17 Jul 2025 11:52:25 EDT news671971940 Caltech scientists have found a fast and efficient way to add up large numbers of Feynman diagrams, the simple drawings physicists use to represent particle interactions. The new method has already enabled the researchers to solve a longstanding problem in the materials science and physics worlds known as the polaron problem, giving scientists and engineers a way to predict how electrons will flow in certain materials, both conventional and quantum. /news/2025-07-adding-feynman-diagrams-real-materials.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:32:55 EDT news671373170 Trinity College Dublin now has Ireland's first and only BioBrillouin microscope, which will enable researchers to make giant strides in the fields of inflammation, cancer, developmental biology and biomedical materials, among others. /news/2025-07-ireland-biobrillouin-microscope-enable-invasive.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Thu, 03 Jul 2025 11:00:05 EDT news670757461 Keeping electronic devices cool is important when considering both their function and durability, as temperature influences material properties and energy flow. The temperature of "hot spots" that can be detected affects the performance of various technologies, from smartphones to electric vehicles. The ability for devices to work at faster speeds has stalled in recent years since adding more power to them has resulted in overheating. /news/2025-07-nanoscale-theoretical.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:10:25 EDT news670666223 Superconductivity is an advantageous physical phenomenon observed in some materials, which entails an electrical resistance of zero below specific critical temperatures. This phenomenon is known to arise following the formation of so-called Cooper pairs (i.e., pairs of electrons). /news/2025-06-trilayer-graphene-high-kinetic-inductance.html Condensed Matter Superconductivity Fri, 27 Jun 2025 07:00:01 EDT news670148101 A condition long considered to be unfavorable to electrical conduction in semiconductor materials may actually be beneficial in 2D semiconductors, according to new findings by UC Santa Barbara researchers published in the journal Â鶹ÒùÔºical Review Letters. /news/2025-06-coupled-electrons-phonons-2d-semiconductors.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Mon, 23 Jun 2025 13:00:16 EDT news669902402