Insulators
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May 21 | News
If you are not a condensed matter physicist, vanadium oxide may be the coolest material you've never heard of. It's a metal. It's an insulator. It's a window coating and an optical switch. And thanks to a new study by physicists at Rice University, scientists have a new way to reversibly alter vanadium oxide's electronic properties by treating it with one of the simplest substances—hydrogen.
May 15 | News
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory theorists and experimenters have led in the exploration of the unique properties of topological insulators, where electrons may flow on the surface without resistance and with their spin orientations and directions intimately related. Recent research at beamline 12.0.1 of the Advanced Light Source opens the way to exciting prospects for practical new spintronic devices that exploit control of electron spin as well as charge.
May 14 | News
A team of Duke
University engineers has
created a master "ingredient list" describing the properties of more
than 2,000 compounds that might be combined to create the next
generation of
quantum electronics devices.
May 8 | News
In the search for new materials with improved electrical conductivity, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have found what appears to be a promising candidate. New experiments show that electrons on the surface of this so-called topological insulator are "protected" from two kinds of scattering that can potentially interfere with the flow of electric current, even at relatively "warm" room temperatures, where the flow of electricity was expected to break down.
Mar 7 | News
An international team of scientists with roots at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University has shown that ultrathin sheets of an exotic material, called topological insulators, remain transparent and highly conductive even after being deeply flexed 1,000 times and folded and creased like a piece of paper.
Jan 24 | News
A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of bilayer graphene (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics. The physicists report that in investigating BLG's properties they found that when the number of electrons on the BLG sheet is close to 0, the material becomes insulating.
Jan 19 | News
Phase-change
random access memory (PCRAM) is a promising technology for
next-generation non-volatile memory, but it has been limited by room
temperature efficiency. A research group in Japan recently invented a
variation of PCRAM that achieves a magnetoresistance effect of more than
2000% at room temperature and higher, and doesn’t require the use of
magnetic elements such as cobalt and platinum.
12/5/2011 | News
Exotic materials called topological insulators, discovered just a few years ago, have yielded some of their secrets to a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers. For the first time, the team showed that light can be used to obtain information about the spin of electrons flowing over the material's surface, and has even found a way to control these electron movements by varying the polarization of a light source.
11/2/2011 | News
Scientists at IBM and ABB are using supercomputers to study and potentially develop a new type of high-voltage insulator that will improve the efficiency of transmitting electricity. An improved insulator has the potential to transform the power grid by reducing energy loss and outages caused by material deterioration when exposed to weather.
10/25/2011 | News
Just
as a corset improves the appearance of its wearer by keeping everything
tightly together, new rigidly constraining insulating materials
invented at Duke University helps prevent the inevitable microscopic
breakdown of the “soft” polymers often used in their construction.
