Pitt researchers develop nanoscale semiconductor islands small enough to hold single electrons
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a way to create semiconductor islands smaller than 10 nanometers in scale, known as quantum dots. The islands, made from germanium and placed on the surface of silicon with two-nanometer precision, are capable of confining single electrons.
“We believe this development moves us closer to our goal of constructing a q
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have made an important theoretical breakthrough in the understanding of energy dissipation and thermal breakdown in metallic carbon nanotubes. Their discovery will help move nanotube wires from laboratory to marketplace.
The remarkable electrical and mechanical properties of metallic carbon nanotubes make them promising candidates for interconnects in future nanoscale electronic devices. But, like tiny metal wires, nan
Scientists from across the world came together in London on 12-13 January to review the scientific and technical status of the LISA mission, the world’s first gravitational wave observatory, at a meeting organised by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and the Institute of Physics.
Scheduled for launch in 2016, LISA will be the largest scientific instrument ever constructed, consisting of three spacecraft, each separated by 5 million kilometres (3 million miles). Its task will
European funding has now been agreed to start designing the world’s largest telescope. The ‘Square Kilometre Array’ (SKA) will be an international radio telescope with a collecting area of one million square metres – equivalent to about 200 football pitches – making SKA 200 times bigger than the University of Manchester’s Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and so the largest radio telescope ever constructed. Such a telescope would be so sensitive that it could detect TV Broadcasts coming from
An MIT researcher’s atom-by-atom simulation of cracks forming and spreading may help explain how materials fail in nanoscale devices, airplanes and even in the Earth itself during a quake. This work, which could impact a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, appears in the Jan. 19 issue of Nature.
“Classical theories of crack dynamics are only valid in a small range of material behavior,” said author Markus J. Buehler, principal investigator in the Atomistic Mech
Research may influence future development of semiconductors, nanocomposites
Physicists at Boston College have for the first time shown that carbon nanotubes can be stretched at high temperature to nearly four times their original length, a finding that could have implications for future semiconductor design as well as in the development of new nanocomposites.
Single-walled carbon nanotubes are tiny cylinders thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair
You may think making a three-point turn in your car is easy, but how about doing the same with a single-charged atom?
That’s what scientists have achieved for the first time, marking a major breakthrough for physics and a first step towards creating the complicated labyrinth of ’atomic motorways’ needed for a quantum computer.
The microscopic motoring manoeuvre was performed by University of Sussex physicist Dr Winfried Hensinger with colleagues at the Uni
Nearly seven years after setting off in pursuit of comet Wild 2, the Stardust return capsule streaked across the night sky of the Western United States early Sunday, making a soft parachute landing in the Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City.
Special helicopter-borne teams secured and recovered the capsule, containing tens of thousands of comet grains and as many as 100 bits of interstellar dust, shortly after it landed. The capsule was moved to a clean room at the Air Forc
The University of Manchester is to launch a new £40m world-class research institute, which will pioneer cutting-edge light and laser technologies.
The Photon Science Institute (PSI), which will be launched on January 18, with support from the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), will be the largest research and teaching centre of its kind in the UK with a projected annual research income of £5m and more than 30 full-time academic staff.
Photon Science – ‘light f
One year ago this week, on 14 January 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe reached the upper layer of Titan’s atmosphere and landed on the surface after a parachute descent 2 hours and 28 minutes later.
As part of the joint NASA/ESA/ASI mission to Saturn and its moons, the Huygens probe was sent from the Cassini spacecraft to explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan’s organic chemistry may be like that of the primitive Earth around 4000 million years ago, and may hold clues about how
With the exception of lasers and free-electron lasers, there hasn’t been another fundamental way to produce coherent light for close to 50 years.
But a group of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a new source of coherent optical radiation that is distinct from lasers and free-electron lasers.
Applications for this research are numerous, but the most immediate result may be a new diagnostic tool t
New evidence that VIRGOHI 21, a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth, is a Dark Galaxy, emitting no star light, was presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D. C. by an international team led by astronomers from the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory and from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. Their results not only indicate the presence of a dark galaxy but also explain the long-standing mys
Scientists around the world eagerly await the arrival of sample particles from Comet Wild 2, which are being brought back to Earth by the US Stardust spacecraft on 15 January this year.
The NASA Stardust mission was launched over seven years ago and has travelled several thousand millions of kilometres in deep space, chasing Comet Wild 2.
In January 2004, the spacecraft encountered the comet to collect samples of particles ejected from its nucleus.
This was ac
The GIOVE-A satellite is in good health and started transmitting the first Galileo signals from medium Earth orbit on 12 January.
GIOVE-A was placed in orbit (altitude 23,260 km) by a Soyuz-Fregat rocket operated by Starsem on 28 December last from the Baikonur cosmodrome. The prime contractor, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, then successfully deployed the 7-metre solar array panels, commissioned the satellite platform and prepared the payload for tests from its Mission Contro
Team improves infinitesimal rings for speedy, reliable, efficient magnetic memory
Imagine a computer that doesn’t lose data even in a sudden power outage, or a coin-sized hard drive that could store 100 or more movies.
Magnetic random-access memory, or MRAM, could make these possible, and would also offer numerous other advantages. It would, for instance, operate at much faster than the speed of ordinary memory but consume 99 percent less energy.
The
Astronomers announced yesterday (Thursday, Jan. 12) what may be the first discovery of a helical magnetic field in interstellar space, coiled like a snake around a gas cloud in the constellation of Orion.
“You can think of this structure as a giant, magnetic Slinky wrapped around a long, finger-like interstellar cloud,’’ said Timothy Robishaw, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. “The magnetic field lines are like stretched rubber ba
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