Researchers steer light in new directions

A team of researchers led by San Francisco State University's Weining Man is the first to build and demonstrate the ability of two-dimensional disordered photonic band gap material, designed to be a platform to control light ...

Disorder can improve the performance of plastic solar cells

Scientists have spent decades trying to build flexible plastic solar cells efficient enough to compete with conventional cells made of silicon. To boost performance, research groups have tried creating new plastic materials ...

Building 3-D fractals on a nano scale

It starts with one 3D structure with eight planes, an octahedron. This repeats itself to smaller octahedra: 625 after just four steps. At every corner of a new octahedron, a successive octahedron is formed. A truly fascinating ...

A giant leap to commercialization of polymer solar cell (PSC)

Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have demonstrated high-performance polymer solar cells (PSCs) with power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 8.92% which is the highest values reported ...

Silicone liquid crystal stiffens with repeated compression

(Phys.org) —Squeeze a piece of silicone and it quickly returns to its original shape, as squishy as ever. But scientists at Rice University have discovered that the liquid crystal phase of silicone becomes 90 percent stiffer ...

Ultra-thin transistors spread like butter on toast

Like spreading a thin layer of butter on toast, Cornell scientists have helped develop a novel process of spreading extremely thin organic transistors, and used synchrotron X-rays to watch how the films crystallize.

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