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Category: computing

Dog-bone design helps 2D nanoribbon transistors stay fast and efficient as widths shrink

Transistors, small semiconductor-based switches that control the flow of electricity, are central components of all electronic devices, from computers to smartphones, wearables, sensors and smart appliances. Over the past decades, electronics engineers have been continuously working to boost the speed and performance of transistors while also reducing their size.

A promising approach for miniaturizing transistors entails the use of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, materials that are only one or a few atoms thick. Despite their potential, most high-performing 2D transistors have so far been demonstrated using relatively wide channels, and it has remained unclear whether their performance can be preserved when the channels are made much narrower.

Researchers at Stanford University recently developed new compact transistors based on narrow strips of monolayer 2D semiconducting materials known as nanoribbons. These transistors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, were found to perform remarkably well despite their small size, outperforming previously developed nanoribbon transistors based on the same 2D materials.

The Role of [18F]FDG PET/CT in Predicting Toxicity in Patients with NHL Treated with CAR-T: A Systematic Review

CAR-T-cell therapy, also referred to as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, is a novel method in the field of immunotherapy for the treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). In patients receiving CAR-T-cell therapy, fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography/Computer Tomography ([18F]FDG PET/CT) plays a critical role in tracking treatment response and evaluating the immunotherapy’s overall efficacy. The aim of this study is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the studies aiming to assess and predict toxicity by means of [18F]FDG PET/CT in patients with NHL receiving CAR-T-cell therapy. PubMed/MEDLINE and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) databases were interrogated by two investigators to seek studies involving the use of [18F]FDG PET/CT in patients with lymphoma undergoing CAR-T-cell therapy.

Invasive neurophysiology and whole brain connectomics for neural decoding in patients with brain implants

A modularized open-source pipeline for invasive brain signal decoding bridges the gap between closed-loop neuromodulation and clinical brain–computer interface approaches in a large patient cohort.

Scientists develop predictive roadmap to boost performance in next-gen spintronics

Chiral 2D metal halide perovskites (MHPs) are among the most promising materials for future technologies that exploit the spin of electrons in spin-based optoelectronics, or spintronics, but getting them to perform consistently has proven difficult. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a data-driven approach that identifies and models key synthesis parameters to optimize their performance.

The difficulty stems in part from the sheer number of factors involved in making these materials. Although chiral 2D MHPs are low-cost and easy to fabricate as thin films, optimizing those films for optoelectronic technologies such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or photodetectors is a formidable challenge. Advanced spin-based optoelectronics use circularly polarized light to encode and transmit data. For several years, scientists have searched for ways to enhance these materials’ selectivity for circularly polarized light, but progress has been hampered by a reproducibility problem: Reported performance values for nominally the same material vary by more than two orders of magnitude across different laboratories.

A new study published in the journal Matter offers a roadmap for solving that problem. Scientist Carolin Sutter-Fella and her team at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry show how systematically tuning several “knobs” in the fabrication process—such as solvent choice, annealing temperature and film thickness—can reliably improve the material’s chiroptical properties, or its ability to interact with circularly polarized light.

Astrochemical model digs into the universe’s missing sulfur

Sulfur is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. If you peer into a diffuse interstellar cloud, you find loads of it—about the amount expected based on fusion patterns in the stars it was born in. However, if you look at a dense, cold molecular cloud—the kind where those stars actually form—it seems like 99% of the sulfur expected to be there is missing. Scientists have puzzled over this “missing sulfur problem” for decades, though a leading theory is that the element hides in icy dust grains, making it hard to detect.

A new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Centro de Astrobiologia describes a new computer simulation model aimed at supporting the interpretation of laboratory results and testing our current understanding of sulfur evolution in interstellar ices.

The simulation was written in pyRate—a Python-based application that calculates how chemicals interact, especially between ice and gas phases. The paper marks the first successful model of the chemistry of a multicomponent interstellar ice analog with a rate-equation simulation. Scientists love “firsts,” but what does that actually mean in practice in this case?

Copper thin films reveal ballistic electron transport that could reshape future chip wiring

A joint research team has experimentally observed ballistic transport in single-crystalline copper thin films, demonstrating that ballistic transport is achievable in an industry-standard metal at interconnect-relevant dimensions. The study, titled “Ballistic transport in nanodevices based on single-crystalline Cu thin films,” was published in Nature Communications.

Ballistic transport refers to a phenomenon in which electrons travel along straight trajectories without scattering. Until now, this behavior has mainly been observed in special quantum materials such as graphene or semiconductor nanostructures. In copper, where electron scattering is pronounced, realizing ballistic transport has been considered practically impossible.

In this study, the team led by Professor Gil-Ho Lee of the Department of Physics at POSTECH, Professor Emeritus Se-Young Jeong of the School of Transdisciplinary Engineering at Pusan National University and Professor Seong-Gon Kim of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Mississippi State University, experimentally demonstrated that ballistic transport can occur in structures with a thickness of 80 nm and a linewidth of 150 nm, dimensions comparable to those used in semiconductor interconnects.

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