Graphene continues to reign as the next potential superstar material for the electronics industry, a slimmer, stronger and much faster electron conductor than silicon. With no natural energy band-gap, however, graphene’s superfast conductance can’t be switched off, a serious drawback for transistors and other electronic devices. Various techniques have been deployed to overcome this problem […]
New Semiconductor Holds Promise for 2D Physics & Electronics
From super-lubricants, to solar cells, to the fledgling technology of valleytronics, there is much to be excited about with the discovery of a unique new two-dimensional semiconductor, rhenium disulfide, by researchers at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry. Rhenium disulfide, unlike molybdenum disulfide and other dichalcogenides, behaves electronically as if it were a 2D monolayer even as […]
Big Step for Next-Generation Fuel Cells and Electrolyzers
A big step in the development of next-generation fuel cells and water-alkali electrolyzers has been achieved with the discovery of a new class of bimetallic nanocatalysts that are an order of magnitude higher in activity than the target set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for 2017. The new catalysts, hollow polyhedral nanoframes of […]
New Detector System May Lead to Better Understanding of Early Universe
In the first few microseconds after the big bang, the universe was a superhot, superdense primordial soup of “quarks” and “gluons,” particles of matter and carriers of force respectively. This quark-gluon plasma cooled almost instantly but it’s brief existence set the stage for the universe we know today. To better understand how our universe evolved, […]
Diamond Imperfections Pave the Way to Technology Gold
From supersensitive detections of magnetic fields to quantum information processing, the key to a number of highly promising advanced technologies may lie in one of the most common defects in diamonds. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have taken an important step towards unlocking this […]
On the Road to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing
Reliable quantum computing would make it possible to solve certain types of extremely complex technological problems millions of times faster than today’s most powerful supercomputers. Other types of problems that quantum computing could tackle would not even be feasible with today’s fastest machines. The key word is “reliable.” If the enormous potential of quantum computing […]
New Twist in the Graphene Story
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a unique new twist to the story of graphene, sheets of pure carbon just one atom thick, and in the process appear to have solved a mystery that has held back device development. Electrons can race through graphene at […]