Charge Carrier

In the search for more efficient and sustainable energy generation methods, a class of materials called metal halide perovskites have shown great promise. In the few years since their discovery, novel solar cells based on these materials have already achieved efficiencies comparable to commercial silicon solar cells.

A new approach to developing semiconductor materials at tiny scales could help boost applications that rely on converting light to energy. A Los Alamos-led research team incorporated magnetic dopants into specially engineered colloidal quantum dots—nanoscale-size semiconductor crystals—and was able to achieve effects that may power solar cell technology, photo detectors and applications that depend on light to…

Researchers use a new tool to help improve a key component in commercially produced quantum computing circuits. The team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames National Laboratory in partnership with the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS), a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by Fermilab, used the terahertz SNOM microscope, originally…

Excitons are electron-hole pairs in semiconductors that are electrostatically bound by strong Coulombic interactions. In ultrathin 2D semiconductors that are a few atoms thick (typically ~0.7 nm), the decreased z-dimension presents strong quantum confinement and reduced dielectric effects that feature a plethora of stable excitonic species (neutral excitons, trions, biexcitons, defect-bound excitons).

A study carried out by a research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), University of Exeter Centre for Graphene Science, and TU Eindhoven demonstrates that graphene-based materials can be used to efficiently convert high-frequency signals into visible light, and that this mechanism is ultrafast and tunable, as the team presents…

In a new study, scientists have observed long-lived excitons in a topological material, opening intriguing new research directions for optoelectronics and quantum computing.

Solar power technologies, which use solar cells to convert sunlight to electricity or storable fuels, are gaining momentum in a world looking beyond fossil fuels for its energy needs.

Perovskite lasers have rapidly achieved progress in developing continuous-wave excited lasing from a femtosecond pulse excited lasing, which is considered a critical step towards electrically excited lasing. After continuous-wave lasing at room temperature, the next goal is to realize electrically driven lasing.

Microelectronics forms the foundation of much modern technology today, including smartphones, laptops and even supercomputers. It is based on the ability to allow and stop the flow of electrons through a material. Spin electronics, or spintronics, is a spinoff. It is based on the spin of electrons, and the fact that the electron spin along with the electric charge creates a magnetic field.

To synthesize hydrocarbons via sunlight, CO2 and water is commonly seen in the nature, especially in the plant kingdom, but it remains an inviting challenging in science amidst growing interest in pursuing new and clean energy. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Xiong Jieyu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reports a broadband plasmon-induced CO2 reduction reaction, which achieves a…

The shifting, scintillating pattern you can see when you stack two slightly misaligned window screens is called moiré. A similar interference effect occurs when scientists stack two-dimensional crystals with mismatched atomic spacings. Moiré superlattices display exotic physical properties that are absent in the layers that make up the patterns. These properties are rooted in the quantum nature of electrons.

A team from China published new work on rechargeable aluminum batteries in Energy Material Advances.

Neutron stars and black holes may be stellar corpses, but they are among the most active celestial objects. They produce some of the highest-energy radiation ever observed, and scientists have long puzzled over the physics that underlies the process powering their energetic emissions.

With their superior efficiency, stability, and device volume properties, conventional light emitting diodes (LEDs) have already revolutionized the lighting and display world. LEDs are typically stacks of semiconductor thin films with lateral dimensions on the order of millimeters, which are much smaller than traditional devices such as the incandescent light bulbs and the cathode tubes.

Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are the basic building blocks for flexible and stretchable electronics. As organic semiconductor films usually contain significant structural and energetic disorder, charge carriers hop between localized states for charge transport, and thus the mobility of OTFTs generally shows thermally activated behavior, i.e., the mobility increases with increasing temperature. The increase…

IBM Research partnered with Tokyo Electron to streamline the 3D chip stacking process and alleviate the strain on the chip industry for years to come.

New device operates at femtosecond time scales thanks to light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers

As electronic, thermoelectric and computer technologies have been miniaturized to nanometer scale, engineers have faced a challenge studying fundamental properties of the materials involved; in many cases, targets are too small to be observed with optical instruments.

Photonics researchers have introduced a novel method to control a light beam with another beam through a unique plasmonic metasurface in a linear medium at ultra-low power. This simple linear switching method makes nanophotonic devices such as optical computing and communication systems more sustainable requiring low intensity of light.

Phonons are collective atomic vibrations, or quasiparticles, that act as the main heat carriers in a crystal lattice. Under certain circumstances, their properties can be modified by electric fields or light. But until now, nobody had noticed that they can respond to magnetic fields as well.