NEWSROOM

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 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.

Strange things happen to materials when you peel them down, layer by layer, from thick chunks all the way to sheets just an atom thick. Reporting in the journal Nature Materials, a team led by physicists at The University of Texas at Austin has experimentally demonstrated a sequence of exotic magnetic phases in an ultrathin material that for the first time fully realize a theoretical model of two-dimensional magnetism first proposed in the 1970s. The researchers say the advan