How Hot Electrons Get Cool

2022-04-20T13:29:56-06:00
04/20
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Thermalizing nanowires

It’s a hot summer day. You desperately want something cold to drink, but unfortunately, your bottle of root beer has been sitting in a hot car all day. You put it into a bucket full of ice to cool it down. But it’s taking forever! How, you wonder, could you speed the process up? The same question is important for understanding how electronic devices work, and how we can make them work better by controlling the temperature of the electrons that power them. Read on to find out what a bottle of root beer in a cooler full of ice and a nanowire in a vat of liquid helium have in common!

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How Hot Electrons Get Cool2022-04-20T13:29:56-06:00

Heat Flow and Quantum Oscillators

2021-07-14T10:28:06-06:00
11/05
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Good vibrations

Materials that are absolutely perfect—in other words, materials that contain no defect of any kind—are usually not very interesting. Imagine being married to a saint: you would quickly be bored out of your mind! Defects and impurities can considerably change many properties of materials in ways that allow a wide range of applications.

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Heat Flow and Quantum Oscillators2021-07-14T10:28:06-06:00

How to Turn a Metal Into an Insulator

2021-07-14T10:30:43-06:00
11/05
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Locking up electrons

Solids are generally divided into metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which do not. Some oxides straddle this boundary, however: a material's structure and properties suggest it should be a metal, but it sometimes behaves as an insulator. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara are digging into the mechanisms of this transformation and are aiming to harness it for use in novel electronic devices.

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How to Turn a Metal Into an Insulator2021-07-14T10:30:43-06:00

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

2021-07-14T11:19:50-06:00
11/05
Researchers at IBM moved around iron atoms on a copper surface to spell out the Kanji characters for the word atom. Image courtesy of IBM.
Researchers at IBM moved around iron atoms on a copper surface to spell out the Kanji characters for the word atom. Image courtesy of IBM.
Using STM to take pictures of atoms

You’re lining up your phone to take a picture of your dog. Light comes down from the sun, bounces off the dog, and into your camera lens, allowing you to take the photo. Your eyes work similarly, taking in all the light particles, known as photons, that are scattering off of objects in the world. Most things “see” by detecting these bouncing photons, which is why both you and your phone have a hard time seeing anything at all when the lights are off.

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Scanning Tunneling Microscopy2021-07-14T11:19:50-06:00

Froot Loops, Legos, and Self-Assembly

2021-07-14T11:15:04-06:00
02/12
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Forming nanostructures

Self-assembly is the process by which individual building blocks—at the smallest level, atoms—spontaneously form larger structures. The structures they form depend on the size and shape of the building blocks, and on the conditions to which these building blocks are exposed. This can be demonstrated quite simply using breakfast cereal, or for more complex cases using specially prepared Legos.

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Froot Loops, Legos, and Self-Assembly2021-07-14T11:15:04-06:00

Spin cant? Spin CAN!

2021-07-14T10:46:48-06:00
01/25
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Magnets with a twist
by Aldo Raeliarijaona, Alexey Kovalev

In most magnetic materials, the magnetic moments of individual atoms are aligned parallel to one another and point in the same direction. In special structures called skyrmions and antiskyrmions, however, they are arranged in a spiraling pattern. Their stability and compact size makes skyrmions and antiskyrmions especially useful for encoding lots of data in a small space. But a few questions need to be answered before skyrmion-based technology can be used in your iPhone or other memory devices. First, why do these magnetic structures form in some materials and not others? How can we design a system where they will form? And how can we generate these structures on demand? Click to find out!

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Spin cant? Spin CAN!2021-07-14T10:46:48-06:00

Interacting with the World’s Universal Building Blocks

2021-07-14T11:15:48-06:00
08/04
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Free app

AtomTouch is a free, interactive molecular simulation app, created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (UW MRSEC) to allow learners to explore principles of thermodynamics and molecular dynamics in an tactile, engaging way.

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Interacting with the World’s Universal Building Blocks2021-07-14T11:15:48-06:00
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