Blog
- From artificial atoms to quantum information machines: Inside the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics 21/10/2025 The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics honors three quantum physicists—John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis—for their study of quantum mechanics in a macroscopic electrical circuit.
- Scientists create nanofluidic chip with 'brain-like' memory pathways 16/10/2025 Scientists at Monash University have created a tiny fluid-based chip that behaves like neural pathways of the brain, potentially opening the door to a new generation of computers.
- New method for making graphene turns defects into improvements 02/10/2025 Recent research has found a new way to make graphene that adds structural defects to improve the performance of the material that could have benefits across a range of applications—from sensors and batteries, to electronics.
- Onion-like nanoparticles found in aircraft exhaust 30/09/2025 A research team from the National Institute for Environmental Studies (Japan), Zurich University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland), Tokyo Metropolitan University (Japan), and other institutions conducted emission tests on aircraft engines and examined the shapes and internal structures of the exhaust particles with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy.
- Rare-earth tritellurides reveal a hidden ferroaxial order of electronic origin 25/09/2025 The discovery of "hidden orders," organization patterns in materials that cannot be detected using conventional measurement tools, can yield valuable insight, which can in turn support the design of new materials with advantageous properties and characteristics. The hidden orders that condensed matter physicists hope to uncover lie within so-called charge density waves (CDWs).
- Synthetic magnetic fields steer light on a chip for faster communications 18/09/2025 Electrons in a magnetic field can display striking behaviors, from the formation of discrete energy levels to the quantum Hall effect. These discoveries have shaped our understanding of quantum materials and topological phases of matter. Light, however, is made of neutral particles and does not naturally respond to magnetic fields in the same way. This has limited the ability of researchers to reproduce such effects in optical systems, particularly at the high frequencies used in modern communications.
- Solid-state batteries get a boost with new protective coating 16/09/2025 In everyday life, we use many protective barriers: Sunscreen shields us from the sun, umbrellas keep us dry in the rain and oven mitts protect our hands from hot pans. Similarly, batteries need protection to stop their internal components from breaking down due to environmental exposure.
- MicroscopyGPT: Generating Atomic-Structure Captions from Microscopy Images of 2D Materials with Vision-Language Transformers 12/09/2025 Determining complete atomic structures directly from microscopy images remains a long-standing challenge in materials science. MicroscopyGPT is a vision-language model (VLM) that leverages multimodal generative pretrained transformers to predict full atomic configurations, including lattice parameters, element types, and atomic coordinates, from scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images. The model is trained on a chemically and structurally diverse data set of simulated STEM images generated using the AtomVision tool and the JARVIS-DFT as well as the C2DB two-dimensional (2D) materials databases. The training set for fine-tuning comprises approximately 5000 2D materials, enabling the model to learn complex mappings from image features to crystallographic representations. I fine-tune the 11-billion-parameter LLaMA model, allowing efficient training on resource-constrained hardware. The rise of VLMs and the growth of materials data sets offer a major opportunity for microscopy-based analysis. This work highlights the potential of automated structure reconstruction from microscopy, with broad implications for materials discovery, nanotechnology, and catalysis.
- Material design strategy unlocks magnetic tunability in quasicrystal approximants 11/09/2025 In stoichiometric compounds (compounds with fixed ratios of elements), the elemental ratios are dictated by chemical stability, which constrains how much the composition, and consequently the number of valence electron-per-atom (e/a) ratio, can be adjusted. Tuning e/a has proved to be a promising strategy to architect magnetic properties in many intermetallic compounds, especially those with complex structures including quasicrystals (QCs) and their structurally related approximant crystals (ACs).
- Stretchable nanofilms unlock tunable magnetic properties, paving way for advanced electronics 09/09/2025 Scientists at The University of Osaka and Tohoku University have developed a technique for creating nanoscale magnetic thin films with embedded functionality. By leveraging the stretchability of flexible substrates, they can precisely control the atomic spacing within these nanofilms, effectively "programming" desired magnetic properties directly into the material.
- A new iron compound hints ‘primordial’ helium hides in Earth’s core 04/09/2025 Helium atoms filled gaps in iron crystals under high pressure and temperature