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Category: materials

Novel membrane boosts water electrolysis performance in low-alkalinity conditions

As green hydrogen emerges as a key next-generation clean energy source, securing technologies that enable its stable and cost-effective production has become a critical challenge. However, conventional water electrolysis technologies face limitations in large-scale deployment due to high system costs and operational burdens.

In particular, long-term operation often leads to performance degradation and increased maintenance costs, hindering commercialization. As a result, there is growing demand for new electrolysis technologies that can simultaneously improve efficiency, stability, and cost competitiveness.

A research team led by Dr. Dirk Henkensmeier at the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed a novel membrane material for water electrolysis that operates stably and has significantly higher conductivity under low alkalinity conditions than existing systems.

Laser Light Rewrites Magnetism in Breakthrough Quantum Material

Researchers at the University of Basel and ETH Zurich have found a way to flip the magnetic polarity of an unusual ferromagnet using a laser beam. If the approach can be refined and scaled, it points toward electronic components that could be reconfigured with light instead of being permanently fixed.

A ferromagnet acts like it has a built-in internal agreement. Inside the material, enormous numbers of electrons behave like tiny bar magnets because of their spins. When those spins line up, their individual magnetic fields add together, producing the familiar strength that makes a compass needle settle in a direction or lets a refrigerator magnet cling to a door.

That orderly alignment is not automatic, because heat constantly shakes the system. Ferromagnetism appears only when the interactions that encourage alignment win out over thermal motion, which happens below a critical temperature (often called the Curie temperature).

Physicists Watch a Superfluid Freeze, Revealing a Strange New Quantum State of Matter

Physicists have observed a strange new quantum phase in a graphene-based system, where a superfluid appears to freeze into a solid-like state. Cooling usually pushes matter through a simple sequence. A gas condenses into a liquid, and with further cooling the liquid locks into a solid. Helium hel

Scientists develop high-performance Hg-based crystal for mid-far infrared birefringence

Mid- and far-infrared birefringent crystals are key functional materials for polarization control, laser technologies, and infrared photonics. However, existing materials generally suffer from limited infrared transparency, an intrinsic trade-off between large birefringence and wide transmission windows, and challenges in optical characterization due to restricted crystal dimensions.

Study: The infant universe’s “primordial soup” was actually soupy

In its first moments, the infant universe was a trillion-degree-hot soup of quarks and gluons. These elementary particles zinged around at light speed, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” that lasted for only a few millionths of a second. The primordial goo then quickly cooled, and its individual quarks and gluons fused to form the protons, neutrons, and other fundamental particles that exist today.

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are recreating quark-gluon plasma (QGP) to better understand the universe’s starting ingredients. By smashing together heavy ions at close to light speeds, scientists can briefly dislodge quarks and gluons to create and study the same material that existed during the first microseconds of the early universe.

Now, a team at CERN led by MIT physicists has observed clear signs that quarks create wakes as they speed through the plasma, similar to a duck trailing ripples through water. The findings are the first direct evidence that quark-gluon plasma reacts to speeding particles as a single fluid, sloshing and splashing in response, rather than scattering randomly like individual particles.

Thomas Edison May Have Created a Miracle Material Before Physics Knew It Existed

A modern materials study suggests that Thomas Edison’s early light bulb experiments may have unknowingly produced graphene decades before the material was formally theorized or isolated. Thomas Edison never heard the word “graphene,” yet researchers at Rice University think his work may still bru

Novel ferroelectric ultraviolet photodetector achieves near-10,000-fold speed increase

Researchers from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a new ferroelectric ultraviolet photodetector material that overcomes the long-standing performance limitations of conventional photodetectors.

This breakthrough, published in Nature Communications, promises to enable next-generation optical detection with ultra-fast speed, high sensitivity, and low noise across a wide range of applications.

Photodetectors convert light signals into electrical currents and are fundamental to modern optoelectronics. They are essential for technologies such as high-speed optical communications, environmental monitoring, and space exploration. However, creating a material that possesses all three of these qualities has been a significant challenge.

Beyond polymers: New state-of-the-art 3D micro and nanofabrication technique overcomes material limitations

Building things so small that they are smaller than the width of a human hair was previously achieved by using a method called two-photon polymerization, also known as 2PP—today’s state-of-the-art in 3D micro- and nanofabrication. Tiny sculptures such as a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal made the headlines.

The infant universe’s ‘primordial soup’ was actually soupy, study finds

In its first moments, the infant universe was a trillion-degree-hot soup of quarks and gluons. These elementary particles zinged around at light speed, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” that lasted for only a few millionths of a second. The primordial goo then quickly cooled, and its individual quarks and gluons fused to form the protons, neutrons, and other fundamental particles that exist today.

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are recreating quark-gluon plasma (QGP) to better understand the universe’s starting ingredients. By smashing together heavy ions at close to light speeds, scientists can briefly dislodge quarks and gluons to create and study the same material that existed during the first microseconds of the early universe.

Now, a team at CERN led by MIT physicists has observed clear signs that quarks create wakes as they speed through the plasma, similar to a duck trailing ripples through water. The findings are the first direct evidence that quark-gluon plasma reacts to speeding particles as a single fluid, sloshing and splashing in response, rather than scattering randomly like individual particles.

The first direct observation of a liquid charge density wave

Charge density waves (CDWs) are ordered, crystal-like patterns in the arrangement of electrons that spontaneously form inside some solid materials. These patterns can change how electricity flows through materials, in some cases prompting the emergence of superconductivity or other unusual physical states.

Physics theories suggest that at certain temperatures CDWs “melt,” similarly to how conventional solids transition to a liquid state. So far, however, this transition to a liquid CDW had not yet been observed experimentally.

Researchers at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have gathered the first direct evidence of a CDW liquid state in the layered transition metal dichalcogenide 1T-TaS2. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open new possibilities for the study of hidden electronic phases in correlated physical systems.

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