Crystal with a twist: scientists grow spiraling new material

With a simple twist of the fingers, one can create a beautiful spiral from a deck of cards. In the same way, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have ...

Nanostructures made of previously impossible material

Materials scientists often seek to change the physical properties of a material by adding a certain proportion of an additional element; however, it isn't always possible to incorporate the desired quantity into the crystal ...

Building bridges between nanowires

Place a layer of gold only a few atoms high on a surface bed of germanium, apply heat to it, and wires will form of themselves. Gold-induced wires is what Mocking prefers to call them. Not 'gold wires', as the wires are not ...

Growing thin films of germanium

Researchers have developed a new technique to produce thin films of germanium crystals—key components for next-generation electronic devices such as advanced large-scale integrated circuits and flexible electronics, which ...

Researchers develop chemically specialised germanium surface

Researchers at the Ruhr Universität Bochum have developed a new method for attaching proteins to the surface of germanium crystals – for the first time also membrane proteins. This enables time-resolved tracking of the ...

MAJORANA, the search for the most elusive neutrino of all

(Phys.org) -- In a cavern almost a mile underground in the Black Hills, an experiment called the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, 40 kilograms of pure germanium crystals enclosed in deep-freeze cryostat modules, will soon set out to ...