Materials Science

Engineers Make World's Fastest Organic Transistor, Heralding New Generation of See-through Electronics

Teams from Stanford, SLAC and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln collaborate to make thin, transparent semiconductors that could become the foundation for cheap, high-performance displays.

New X-ray Laser Technique Measures Atomic Vibrations Faster, More Accurately

An international team led by scientists from two SLAC/Stanford institutes has devised a much faster and more accurate way of measuring subtle atomic vibrations that underlie important hidden properties of materials.

User Spotlight: Giving Smart Materials an IQ Test at SSRL

Anna Llordes from Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry uses SSRL's Beam Line 11-3 for clues about where the smart films her group creates for windows get their high energy IQ.

Will 2-D Tin be the Next Super Material?

A single layer of tin atoms could be the world’s first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate.

Scientists Invent Self-healing Battery Electrode

Researchers have made the first battery electrode that heals itself, opening a new and potentially commercially viable path for making the next generation of lithium ion batteries for electric cars, cell phones and other devices. The secret is a stretchy polymer that coats the electrode, binds it together and spontaneously heals tiny cracks that develop during battery operation, said the team from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

A New Topological Insulator Breaks Symmetry, and That's a Good Thing

Scientists working at SLAC, Stanford, Oxford, Berkeley Lab and in Tokyo have discovered a new type of quantum material whose lopsided behavior may lend itself to creating novel electronics.

Copper Shock: An Atomic-scale Stress Test

Scientists used the powerful X-ray laser at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create movies detailing trillionths-of-a-second changes in the arrangement of copper atoms after an extreme shock.

IBM/SLAC Team Controls Switching Behavior of Promising Electronic Material

Working with a metal oxide that shows promise for future generations of electronic devices, IBM and SLAC scientists have shown they can precisely control the temperature at which it flips from being an electrical conductor to an insulator – and thus functions as an electronic switch.

SLAC Scientists Make Detailed Map of Current Between Insulators

When scientists found electrical current flowing where it shouldn't be – at the place where two insulating materials meet– it set off a frenzy of research that turned up more weird properties and the hope of creating a new class of electronics.

Now SLAC and Stanford scientists have mapped those currents in microscopic detail and found another surprise: Rather than flowing uniformly, the currents are stronger in some places than others, like river currents shaped by underlying rock.

Award Recognizes X-ray Research on Organic Semiconductors

Guarav "Gino" Giri, who this summer completed his doctoral work in chemical engineering at Stanford, has been selected to receive this year's Melvin P. Klein Scientific Development Award for his pioneering work aimed at understanding and improving organic semiconductor performance and developing new production methods.

Materials Science

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