Joint research work of Chemnitz University of Technology and several partner universities shows how slow electrons reduce the efficiency of novel organic solar cells – publication in the renowned journal Nature Communications. Photovoltaics will play a key role in the future energy supply. Conventional solar cells based, for instance, on silicon, a well-known semiconductor material, are already highly developed and in widespread use. However, their production is complex because it requires a high vacuum with high temperatures. It can take…

Graphene consists of carbon atoms that crosslink in a plane to form a flat honeycomb structure. In addition to surprisingly high mechanical stability, the material has exciting electronic properties: The electrons behave like massless particles, which can be clearly demonstrated in spectrometric experiments. Measurements reveal a linear dependence of energy on momentum, namely the so-called Dirac cones – two lines that cross without a band gap – i.e. an energy difference between electrons in the conduction band and those in…

A team of astronomers has developed a method that will allow them to ‘see’ through the fog of the early Universe and detect light from the first stars and galaxies. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, have developed a methodology that will allow them to observe and study the first stars through the clouds of hydrogen that filled the Universe about 378,000 years after the Big Bang. Observing the birth of the first stars and galaxies has been…

Laser-manufactured 3D microstructures for complex photonic components. Two institutes from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and one from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft launched the joint project “LAR3S” on March 1, 2022. In this project, they are taking a completely new approach to producing three-dimensional photonic components with lasers, focusing on selective laser-induced etching and inverse laser drilling. A key goal is to achieve processes and procedures that can be automated to a large extent. New ideas for the industrial production of microstructures Glass is a…

International research team manipulates mobile devices with “Ghost Touch”. Touch screens on mobile devices can be attacked and manipulated via charging cables and power supply units. This is what researchers at the System Security Lab at TU Darmstadt have discovered together with a Chinese research team. Several smartphones and standalone touchscreen panels could be compromised in practical tests by simulated touches, the “ghost touches”. The results were presented at this year’s “IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.” The researchers from…

For decades computers have been synonymous with binary information – zeros and ones. Now a team at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, realized a quantum computer that breaks out of this paradigm and unlocks additional computational resources, hidden in almost all of today’s quantum devices. We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars…

A large-scale neutral hydrogen (HI) survey of the local universe is one of the major science initiatives under the Five-hundred Meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) project. Equipped with a 19-beam array receiver and combined with super-high sensitivity owing to its large collection area, FAST is the most powerful survey tool for exploring the HI universe. The late Prof. NAN Rendong, who founded the FAST project and served as its chief scientist and engineer, noted that the FAST HI survey…

West Virginia is now on its way toward launching the state’s second small satellite. A team from West Virginia University and the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium is poised to turn that achievement into a massive boost for the aerospace industry statewide by taking the first steps toward opening the West Virginia Small Satellite Center of Excellence. The SmallSat Center will work with businesses and other organizations to develop West Virginia’s second small satellite and to help those partners offer services…

Many industries are ready to break new ground in production with lasers. To do this, users and suppliers must reconcile digitalization and sustainability, ecology and economy. As an important means to this end, lasers can be integrated into the emerging process chains so that they interact with the entire upstream and downstream processes, saving both time and money. The more than 520 participants at the AKL’22 International Laser Technology Congress in Aachen learned how the laser community is already proactively…

Scientists have developed a new machine-learning platform that makes the algorithms that control particle beams and lasers smarter than ever before. Their work could help lead to the development of new and improved particle accelerators that will help scientists unlock the secrets of the subatomic world. Daniele Filippetto and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed the setup to automatically compensate for real-time changes to accelerator beams and other components, such as magnets. Their…

The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission will greatly expand our knowledge of the high-energy universe and recently passed two key milestones on its path to observing the cosmos. Nicknamed XRISM (pronounced “crism”), the mission is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NASA, with participation by ESA (the European Space Agency), to investigate the X-ray universe using high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy. “In May, the spacecraft components – including its two instruments, named Resolve and Xtend – were mechanically and electrically integrated…

Star systems: The detection of an unusually compact “one of a kind” system of three stars was announced earlier this year. The question about how this unique combination of a binary set of stars and a revolving bigger star can form is now the focus in a collaboration between two young researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Tertiary star formation on a massive scale The star system consists of a binary set of stars –…

Breakthrough in neutron physics: A team from TU Vienna, INRIM Turin and ILL Grenoble has succeeded for the first time in building a neutron interferometer from two separate crystals. Particles can move as waves along different paths at the same time – this is one of the most important findings of quantum physics. A particularly impressive example is the neutron interferometer: neutrons are fired at a crystal, the neutron wave is split into two portions, which are then superimposed on…

A team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries, have found a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbour galaxy to our own. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says study leader Tomer Shenar. Moreover, they found that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished without any sign of a powerful explosion. The discovery was made thanks to…

Discovery of a short-lived state could lead to faster and more energy-efficient computing devices. The Science For the first time, researchers have used ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), an ultrafast camera for detecting tiny atomic movements, to observe a quantum electronic device as it operates. The electronic device in this research is a custom-designed miniature switch made of vanadium dioxide. This material can switch between electrically insulating and conducting states. The researchers toggled the switches electrically while taking snapshots that showed…

Virtual spinal cord is continuously optimized. Like a newborn animal, a four-legged robot stumbles around during its first walking attempts. But while a foal or a giraffe needs much longer to master walking, the robot learns to move forward fluently in just one hour. A computer program acts as the artificial presentation of the animal’s spinal cord, and learns to optimize the robot’s movement in a short time. The artificial neural network is not yet ideally adjusted at the beginning,…