Ultrafast science

From the invisible world of elementary particles to the mysteries of the cosmos, recipients of this prestigious award for early career scientists explore nature at every level.

Edward Hohenstein, Emma McBride and Caterina Vernieri study what happens to molecules hit by light, recreate extreme states of matter like those inside stars and planets, and search for new physics phenomena at the most fundamental level.

With a new suite of tools, scientists discovered exactly how tiny plate-like catalyst particles carry out a key step in that conversion – the evolution of oxygen in an electrocatalytic cell – in unprecedented detail.

Exploring and manipulating the behavior of polar vortices in materials may lead to new technology for faster data transfer and storage.

The results have important implications for today’s TV and display screens and for future technologies where light takes the place of electrons and fluids.

This new understanding could aid the development of more efficient clean energy sources.

A better understanding of the failure process will help researchers design new materials that can better withstand intense events such as high-velocity impacts.

Scientists get dramatically better resolution at X-ray free-electron lasers with a new technique.

Just as pressing a guitar string produces a higher pitch, sending laser light through a material can shift it to higher energies and higher frequencies. Now scientists have discovered how to use this phenomenon to explore quantum materials in a...

These fleeting disruptions, seen for the first time in lead hybrid perovskites, may help explain why these materials are exceptionally good at turning sunlight into electrical current in solar cells.

The results, which show that ultrafast atomic motions are the first step in forming a magnetic state, could lead to faster and more efficient data storage devices.