Building crystalline materials from nanoparticles and DNA

Nature is a master builder. Using a bottom-up approach, nature takes tiny atoms and, through chemical bonding, makes crystalline materials, like diamonds, silicon and even table salt. In all of them, the properties of the ...

Single-crystal films could advance solar cells (w/ Video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Cornell researchers have developed a new method to create a patterned single-crystal thin film of semiconductor material that could lead to more efficient photovoltaic cells and batteries.

Crystal defect shown to be key to making hollow nanotubes

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have no problem making a menagerie of nanometer-sized objects -- wires, tubes, belts, and even tree-like structures. What they sometimes have been unable to do is explain precisely how those objects ...

Researchers create 'synthetic magnetic fields' for neutral atoms

(PhysOrg.com) -- Achieving an important new capability in ultracold atomic gases, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, ...

New study confirms exotic electric properties of graphene

(PhysOrg.com) -- First, it was the soccer-ball-shaped molecules dubbed buckyballs. Then it was the cylindrically shaped nanotubes. Now, the hottest new material in physics and nanotechnology is graphene: a remarkably flat ...

Argonne 'homegrown' hybrid solar cell aims for low-cost power

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have refined a technique to manufacture solar cells by creating tubes of semiconducting material and then "growing" polymers ...

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