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Date Time A material-keyboard made of graphene Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in turning specially prepared graphene flakes either into insulators or into superconductors by applying an electric voltage. This technique even works locally, meaning that in the same graphene flake regions with completely different physical properties can be realized side by side. The material keyboard realized by the ETH Zurich researchers. By applying electric voltages (“keys”) at different points, the magic-angle graphene can become locally superconducting (electron pairs) or isolating (barrier o...

Hydrodeoxygenation is a common way to reduce the oxygen content of biomass fuel. Compared with direct hydrogenation, transfer hydrogenation is safer and...

Chinese Academy of Sciences Recently, a research group led by Prof. ZHANG Haimin from the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Hefei Institute of Physical Science (HFIPS) reported a highly efficient electrocatalyst for oxygen evolution reaction by in situ generation and systematically illustrated the origin of its excellent performance, which provided a new method for exploiting excellent oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. “This is an efficient and low-cost transition metal phosphide (TMP) electrocatalyst by a novel impregnation-pyrolysis synthetic method,” said WANG Haojie, a ...

Credit: Wikipedia.org The energy source of the Sun and other stars is determined by the fusion reaction between two hydrogen nuclei. Imitating this process in a reactor would enable to produce so much energy that satisfy the world's energy needs forever. It would not cause hazardous environmental pollution and the fuel supply would be unlimited. The downside, however, is that the level of radiation in such a fusion reactor would be so high that currently known materials would not tolerate it. Thus, researchers still need to create suitable construction materials for the reactor. The low-power...

Credit: TU Wien We all have a clear picture in mind when we think of metals: We think of solid, unbreakable objects that conduct electricity and exhibit a typical metallic sheen. The behaviour of classical metals, for example their electrical conductivity, can be explained with well-known, well-tested physical theories. But there are also more exotic metallic compounds that pose riddles: Some alloys are hard and brittle, special metal oxides can be transparent. There are even materials right at the border between metal and insulator: tiny changes in chemical composition turn the metal into a...