certain wavelength and direction will also emit heat in the same ways. This fundamental relationship, known as reciprocity, limits our ability to independently control heat absorption and heat emission. But if absorption and emission could be separated, engineers could design devices that absorb heat from one direction while emitting it in another. By ‘steering’ thermal energy, they could create more efficient thermal management, energy conversion, infrared sensing, and th

MIT researchers have found that rhombohedral graphene — a naturally occurring staircase-like stack of four or five atomically thin carbon layers found in ordinary graphite — can host multiple distinct superconducting states simultaneously, a rarity among known superconductors. Publishing in Nature, the team reports that three of these states not only survive exposure to magnetic fields up to around 9 tesla (roughly 180,000 times Earth's magnetic field), which would normally d

MIT researchers have developed a new approach that dramatically improves the modeling of chemically disordered metal alloys, a long-standing challenge in materials science. Traditional simulation techniques struggle with the complex atomic arrangements in real-world alloys. The team addressed this by creating smarter training datasets for machine-learning models that better capture the diverse local chemical environments in disordered materials. Using information theory to ge

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.

A research team from Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan, the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, and other collaborators has demonstrated that space-time crystals—exotic structures that, under external drive, loop endlessly through both space and time—can be created using everyday liquid-crystal materials.

A research team has identified a mechanism that could help overcome the efficiency limitations of thermoelectric devices that convert waste heat into electricity using a “hollow silicon nanotube” structure. The findings were published in Nano Energy, a leading international academic journal in the field of energy and nanotechnology.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with Stanford and Purdue, have demonstrated a powerful new way to control heat at the nanoscale. Using carefully engineered metamaterials — microscopic gold patterns on thin membranes — they achieved up to four times more heat transfer across a tiny gap compared to conventional setups.

Rice University researchers have developed a simple new technique to create nanoscale patterns on hard chip materials at room temperature. By layering anisotropic alpha-molybdenum trioxide crystals on silica and exposing them to an electron beam, the team induced controlled stress that forms highly ordered nanoscale wrinkles or ripples.

A sheet of twisted carbon nanotubes has revealed a hidden talent scientists suspected for decades but had never managed to measure.