Conduction Band

It could change everything.

Hydrogen spillover is exactly what it sounds like. Small metal nanoparticles anchored on a thermally stable oxide, like silica, comprise a major class of catalysts, which are substances used to accelerate chemical reactions without being consumed themselves. The catalytic reaction usually occurs on the reactive—and expensive—metal, but on some catalysts, hydrogen atom-like equivalents literally spill from the metal…

This is an older video but thought that I should share it because of a recent podcast interview that I did. A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with Jack Cheng, the CEO of the EV Open Platform MIH Consortium. I had a great conversation with him about his history in electric vehicles and the EV industry as a whole. Check it out.

A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.

Several studies have predicted that the water splitting reaction could be catalyzed by certain groups of 2D materials—each measuring just a few atoms thick. One particularly promising group are named 2D Janus materials, whose two sides each feature a different molecular composition.

Researchers are working to improve 2D semiconductors by better understanding dark excitons and how they could be applied to future technologies ranging from quantum computers to next-generation solar panels.

In a recent study, a research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences achieved higher thermoelectric performance of n-type lead telluride (PbTe) by adjusting the band structure and enhancing phonon scattering. Results were published in Nanoscale.

Graphene consists of carbon atoms that crosslink in a plane to form a flat honeycomb structure. In addition to surprisingly high mechanical stability, the material has exciting electronic properties. The electrons behave like massless particles, which can be clearly demonstrated in spectrometric experiments. Measurements reveal a linear dependence of energy on momentum, namely the so-called Dirac cones—two lines…

Engineers have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine. The design could someday enable a fully decarbonized power grid, researchers say.

In Carbon Queen, author Maia Weinstock illuminates the life and foundational scientific achievements of MIT's first female institute professor, National Medal of Science winner Mildred Dresselhaus..

A rare spectroscopy technique performed at Swinburne University of Technology directly quantifies the energy required to bind two excitons together, providing for the first time a direct measurement of the biexciton binding energy in WS2.

Hydrogen is not a metal on Earth, but scientists keep trying to create metallic hydrogen under high pressure to unlock a new superconductor.

What will GPT unlock for the nerdy kid sitting in a 7th-grade classroom today?

Oxides of tin (SnxOy) are found in many of modern technologies due to their versatile nature. The multivalent oxidation states of tin—Sn2+ and Sn4+—impart tin oxides with electroconductivity, photocatalysis, and various functional properties. For the photocatalysis application of tin oxides, a narrow bandgap for visible-light absorption is indispensable to utilize a wide range of solar energy. Hence, the discovery…

Long before Dr. Jukka Vayrynen was an assistant professor at the Purdue Department of Physics and Astronomy, he was a post-doc investigating a theoretical model with emergent particles in a condensed matter setting. Once he arrived at Purdue, he intended to expand on the model, expecting it to be relatively easy.

Semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) hold great promise as sensitizers for triplet-triplet annihilation up-conversion (TTA-UC) due to their facile bandgap tunability and negligible inter-system crossing loss. However, the understanding of the correlation between bright/dark exciton and triplet energy transfer (TET) is still lacking. More research on this is strongly needed to reveal the distinctions between…

Scientists have created a Bose-Einstein condensate out of excitons — quasiparticles that combine electrons and positively charged "holes" — in a semiconductor. Quasiparticle Bose-Einstein condensates have for six decades been something of a holy grail of low-temperature physics.

C60 molecules on a gold substrate appear more complex than their graphene counterparts, but have much more ordinary electronic properties. This is now shown by measurements with ARPES at BESSY II and detailed calculations.

The stability of graphene-based field-effect transistors with amorphous aluminium oxide serving as the top-gate oxide can be improved by tuning the Fermilevel of the two-dimensional channel material such that it maximizes the energy distance between the charge carriers in the channel and the defect bands in the gate oxide.

Engineers at MIT and NREL have developed a heat engine with no moving parts that is as efficient as a steam turbine.