Science

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Producing spin-entangled electrons

A team from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science, along with collaborators from several Japanese institutions, have successfully produced pairs of spin-entangled electrons and demonstrated, for the first time, that these electrons remain entangled even when they are separated from one another on a chip. This research could contribute to the creation of futuristic quantum networks operating using quantum teleportation, which could allow information contained in quantum bits--qubits--to be shared between many elements on chip, a key requirement to scale up the power of a quantum computer. The ability to create non-local entangled electron pairs --known as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs --on demand has long been a dream.

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False color scanning electron microscope image of the device.
The two green spots are the quantum dots located in the gap between the two (red) electrodes.

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Measurement of Tiny Amounts of Heavy Metals in Baby Food Samples

Iranian researchers produced a nanosorbent that can adsorb and measure small amounts of heavy metals in children food samples.

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Helium 'balloons' offer new path to control complex materials

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to manipulate a wide range of materials and their behavior using only a handful of helium ions.

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Inserting helium atoms (visualized as a red balloon) into a crystalline film (gold) allowed Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers to control the material's elongation in a single direction.

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Building a better semiconductor: Research led by Michigan State University could someday lead to the development of new and improved semiconductors

In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the scientists detailed how they developed a method to change the electronic properties of materials in a way that will more easily allow an electrical current to pass through.

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MSU researchers have found that by shooting an ultrafast laser pulse into a material, it can change its properties, a process that can lead to the development of new and improved semiconductors. The image on the right is an illustrated view of a material irradiated by the laser pulses. The one of the left is an image of the material showing subtle structural changes as a result of what’s known as photo-doping. Photo courtesy of the MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy.

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Green Chemistry Methods Used in Iran to Produce Zinc Oxide Nanoparticles

Iranian researchers used a new method based on green chemistry to synthesize zinc oxide nanoparticles.

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U.S. Engineers Develop Ballistic Wallpaper

U.S. Troops often use abandoned masonry, brick or cinderblock structures for defensive purposes instead of building their own or digging foxholes.

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Buckle up for fast ionic conduction

ETH material engineers found that the performance of ion-conducting ceramic membranes that are so important in industry depends largely on their strain and buckling profiles. For the first time, scientists can now selectively manipulate the buckling profile, and thus the physical properties, allowing new technical applications of these membranes.

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ETH researchers engineered free-standing ceramic membranes for so-called micro energy converters. The strain patterns of these membranes control their properties.

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Nanoparticles naturally fall into left- and right-handed versions

A team of scientists from ITMO University and Trinity College Dublin published first experimental results showing that ordinary nanocrystals possess intrinsic chirality and can be produced under normal conditions as a half-and-half mixture of mirror images of each other. The discovery of this fundamental property in nanocrystals opens new horizons in nano- and bio-technology and medicine, for instance, for such applications as targeted drug delivery.

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These are levorotatory and dextrorotatory quantum dots with left and right chiral defects.

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A protective shield for sensitive catalysts: Hydrogels block harmful oxygen

An international research team has found a way of protecting sensitive catalysts from oxygen-caused damage. In the future, this could facilitate the creation of hydrogen fuel cells with molecular catalysts or with biomolecules such as the hydrogenase enzyme. To date, this could only be accomplished using the rare and expensive precious metal platinum. Together with their French colleagues, researchers from Bochum and Mülheim describe the way in which a hydrogel can serve as a "protective shield" for biomolecules.

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With a novel hydrogel, sensitive catalysts can be protected from oxygen molecules (red) which could irreversibly damage the catalysts. The hydrogel converts oxygen into water (red-white).

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World's thinnest lightbulb -- graphene gets bright! Columbia engineers and colleagues create bright, visible light emission from one-atom thick carbon

Led by Young Duck Kim, a postdoctoral research scientist in James Hone's group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) reported today that they have demonstrated -- for the first time -- an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate, and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up.

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