As a hard and brittle material, silicon has practically no natural elasticity. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated that amorphous silicon can be grown into superelastic horseshoe-shaped nanowires that can undergo ...
Like a tuning fork struck with a mallet, tiny gold nanodisks can be made to vibrate at resonant frequencies when struck by light. In new research, Rice University researchers showed they can selectively alter those vibrational ...
Nanophysics
Oct 16, 2017
0
289
High-speed optical circuits and sensors generally require strict control over light polarization to minimize loss and cross-talk in photonic devices such as waveguides. An A*STAR team now predicts that noise resulting from ...
Optics & Photonics
Jul 26, 2017
0
3
In many ways, magnets are still mysterious. They get their (often powerful) effects from the microscopic interactions of individual electrons, and from the interplay between their collective behavior at different scales. ...
Nanophysics
Jun 13, 2017
0
1303
The Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo set a world record for creating a Canadian flag measuring about one one-hundredth the width of a human hair.
Nanophysics
Sep 19, 2016
1
1755
Computer chip makers continuously strive to pack more transistors in less space, yet as the size of those transistors approaches the atomic scale, there are physical limits on how small they are able to make the patterns ...
Nanophysics
Sep 9, 2016
0
722
Ordered patterns of gold nanoparticles on a silicon base can be stimulated to produce collective electron waves known as plasmons that absorb only certain narrow bands of light, making them promising for a wide range of arrays ...
Nanophysics
Sep 8, 2016
0
11
A device made of bilayer graphene, an atomically thin hexagonal arrangement of carbon atoms, provides experimental proof of the ability to control the momentum of electrons and offers a path to electronics that could require ...
Nanomaterials
Aug 29, 2016
0
112
Waveguides are widely used for filtering, confining, guiding, coupling or splitting beams of visible light. However, creating waveguides that could do the same for X-rays has posed tremendous challenges in fabrication, so ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 18, 2016
0
8
Making faster, more powerful electronics requires smaller but still uniform connections, or junctions, between different materials. For the first time, researchers created extremely small, 5-nanometer-wide junctions, which ...
Nanomaterials
Jun 13, 2016
0
9
