In the early 20th century, the development of a catalyst for ammonia synthesis by the Haber-Bosch method took more than 10,000 experiments before it was successful. The development of new materials is a time-consuming and costly process from design to commercialization.
While we usually think of disorder as a bad thing, a team of materials science researchers led by Rohan Mishra, from Washington University in St. Louis, and Jayakanth Ravichandran, from the University of Southern California, have revealed that—when it comes to certain crystals—a little structural disorder might have big impacts on useful optical properties.
An X-ray burst (XRB) is a violent explosion that occurs on the surface of a neutron star as it absorbs material from a companion star. During this absorption, increasing temperatures and densities on the surface of the neutron star ignite a cascade of thermonuclear reactions.
Engineers at Princeton and North Carolina State University have combined ancient paper-folding and modern materials science to create a soft robot that bends and twists through mazes with ease.
Two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (2D COFs) enable the construction of bespoke functional materials, but designing dynamic 2D COFs is challenging. Now it has been shown that perylene-diimide-based COFs can open and close their pores upon uptake or removal of guests, while fully retaining their crystalline long-range order. Moreover, the variable COF geometry enables stimuli-responsive optoelectronic properties.
The work introduces a completely new way to create and study strange metals, whose electrons behave differently than those in a conventional metal like copper. “It is a potential new approach to designing these unusual materials,” says Joseph G. Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the research and Associate Professor of Physics.
Linda Ye, MIT Ph.D. ‘21, is first author of a paper on the work published earlier this year in Nature Physics. “A new way of making strange metals will help us develop a unifying theory behind their behavior. That has been quite challenging to date, and could lead to a better understanding of other materials, including high-temperature superconductors,” says Ye, now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology.
The Nature Physics paper is accompanied by a News & Views article titled, “A strange way to get a strange metal.”
A team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has drawn inspiration from a wide variety of natural geometric motifs—including those of 12-sided dice and potato chips—in order to extend a set of well-known design principles to an entirely new class of spongy materials that can self-assemble into precisely controllable structures.
A 3D-printed, bioactive hydrogel described in Science Advances promotes rats’ recovery from injuries to the muscle-tendon junction, a promising treatment option for common strain injuries.
A team at HZB has investigated a new, simple method at BESSY II that can be used to create stable radial magnetic vortices in magnetic thin films.
In some materials, spins form complex magnetic structures within the nanometre and micrometer scale in which the magnetization direction twists and curls along specific directions. Examples of such structures are magnetic bubbles, skyrmions, and magnetic vortices.
Spintronics aims to make use of such tiny magnetic structures to store data or perform logic operations with very low power consumption, compared to today’s dominant microelectronic components. However, the generation and stabilization of most of these magnetic textures is restricted to a few materials and achievable under very specific conditions (temperature, magnetic field…).
From extreme cold to strong magnets and high pressures, the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF) provides conditions for researching these potential wonder materials.
