Throughout decades of research on solar cells, one formula has been considered an absolute limit to the efficiency of such devices in converting sunlight into electricity: Called the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit, it ...
Energy & Green Tech
Apr 18, 2013
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Life as we know it is based upon the elements of carbon and oxygen. Now a team of physicists, including one from North Carolina State University, is looking at the conditions necessary to the formation of those two elements ...
General Physics
Mar 13, 2013
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1
(Phys.org)—A University of Michigan biophysical chemist and his colleagues have discovered the smallest and fastest-known molecular switches made of RNA, the chemical cousin of DNA. The researchers say these rare, fleeting ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 7, 2012
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Renaissance architects demonstrated their understanding of geometry and physics when they built whispering galleries into their cathedrals. These circular chambers were designed to amplify and direct sound waves so that, ...
Nanomaterials
Jul 22, 2011
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Observation of a scientific rule being broken can sometimes lead to new knowledge and important applications. Such would seem to be the case when scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National ...
Nanophysics
Jul 1, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at the University of Bristol in the UK have proposed a refrigerator that consists of just a few quantum particles -- qubits.
The membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin is a proton pump, in which proton transport is initiated by the light-induced isomerization of the chromophore retinal. The molecular quantum states involved in this ultrafast reaction ...
Optics & Photonics
17 hours ago
0
2
Researchers at EPFL have discovered that by shining different wavelengths (colors) of light on a material called magnetite, they can change its state, e.g., making it more or less conducive to electricity. The discovery could ...
Condensed Matter
Jun 21, 2024
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452
Similar to how a radio antenna plucks a broadcast from the air and concentrates the energy into a song, individual atoms can collect and concentrate the energy of light into a strong, localized signal that researchers can ...
Optics & Photonics
Jun 10, 2024
3
468
Recently, a team of chemists, mathematicians, physicists and nano-engineers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands developed a device to control the emission of photons with unprecedented precision. This technology ...
Nanophysics
May 29, 2024
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