Discover Top Posts Tagged with #heterostructures

Advancing porous materials: Scientists create solar-powered water treatment material

Brazilian scientists have made advances in an area recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the development and application of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These are porous crystalline materials that have the potential to revolutionize environmental and energy technologies. The study involved researchers affiliated with the Center for Development of Functional Materials based at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). The study introduces a novel molecular architecture based on zirconium MOFs that is designed to efficiently degrade emerging water contaminants, including industrial dyes and antibiotics. This research builds upon the scientific advances that led to last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry being awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi for creating a new form of molecular architecture. The laureates were responsible for establishing the fundamentals of MOFs, which are materials formed by the combination of metal ions and organic ligands that organize themselves into highly porous crystalline networks.

Green H₂ from water splitting via unique two-dimensional photocatalysts

Over the past 20 years, green hydrogen produced using sunlight has gained considerable attention as a promising pathway toward a low-carbon future. Among the various solar-driven methods for H2 production, the photocatalytic process stands out for its simplicity, low cost, and suitability for scaling up. Forming 2D/2D chemically bonded epitaxial heterostructures, which combine two semiconductors with suitable band-edge positions to enable a direct Z scheme charge transfer, is one strategy that simultaneously tackles several photocatalytic challenges. The hydrothermal topochemical process was performed from precursors, Bi4Ti3O12 platelets and SrCl2×6H2O, in an autoclave. A new study, published in the Chemical Engineering Journal, sheds light on the steering of the Bi₄Ti₃O₁₂-to-SrTiO₃ hydrothermal transformation to precisely control the surface roughness and photocatalytic properties of the 2D/2D epitaxial heterostructural SrTiO₃/Bi₄Ti₃O₁₂ nanoplatelets.

Sprinkling nanoparticles on spintronics

Today, I want to walk you through a deceptively simple innovation from the lab at Loughborough University (PI: Prof Marco Peccianti): what happens when we decorate a spintronic heterostructure with a sparse layer of plasmonic nanoparticles? This isn't just a lab curiosity—it's a step toward making terahertz sources more efficient, compact, and practical for real-world applications like high-speed communications, noninvasive imaging, and advanced spectroscopy. Spintronic THz emitters: The foundation Spintronic terahertz emitters rely on a thin, multilayer stack—typically heavy metal like tungsten (W), a ferromagnetic layer such as iron (Fe), and a platinum (Pt) cap. A femtosecond laser pulse strikes the structure, rapidly heating electrons and generating a pure spin current through spin-orbit torque effects.

Electrical control of magnetism in 2D materials promises to advance spintronics

Conventional electronics process information leveraging the electrical charge of electrons. Over the past few decades, some electronics engineers have been exploring the potential of a different type of device that instead processes and stores data exploiting the intrinsic magnetic moment (i.e., spin) of electrons. These devices, known as spintronics, could consume less energy, process data faster and be easier to reduce in size than current electronics. A central objective for engineers who are developing spintronics is to identify promising strategies to control magnetism in devices without wasting power. One promising approach to control magnetism entails the use of multiferroics, materials that exhibit both ferroelectricity, meaning that positive and negative charges in them are permanently separated, and ferromagnetism, which means that magnetic moments in them are aligned. When one of these properties can be used to control the other, this is known as magnetoelectric coupling.

Electrons stay put in layers of mismatched 'quantum Legos'

Electrons can be elusive, but Cornell researchers using a new computational method can now account for where they go—or don't go—in certain layered materials. Physics and engineering researchers have confirmed that in certain quantum materials, known as "misfits" because their crystal structures don't align perfectly—picture LEGOs where one layer has a square grid and the other a hexagonal grid—electrons mostly stay in their home layers. This discovery, important for designing materials with quantum properties including superconductivity, overturns a long-standing assumption. For years, scientists believed that large shifts in energy bands in certain misfit materials meant electrons were physically moving from one layer to the other. But the Cornell researchers have found that chemical bonding between the mismatched layers causes electrons to rearrange in a way that increases the number of high-energy electrons, while few electrons move from one layer to the other.

Controlling triple quantum dots in a zinc oxide semiconductor

Quantum computers have the potential to solve certain calculations exponentially faster than a classic computer could, but more research is desperately needed to make their practical use a reality. Quantum computers use a basic unit of information called quantum bits (qubits) to run—like how classical computers use a binary system of 0s and 1s, but with many more possibilities. However, a large number of qubits are required for quantum computers to function. Research into quantum dots—nanostructures with unique properties that allow them to serve as qubits—is crucial to overcoming this roadblock. Breakthrough in controlling quantum dots Researchers at the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR), Tohoku University, have made a significant step toward the realization of next-generation quantum information processing technologies. The study was published in Scientific Reports.

Pressure turns Ångström-thin semiconducting bismuth into a metal, expanding options for reconfigurable electronics

Two-dimensional (2D) materials, sparked by the isolation of Nobel-prize-winning graphene in 2004, has revolutionized modern materials science by showing that electrical, optical, and mechanical behaviors can be tuned simply by adjusting the thickness, strain, or stacking order of such 2D materials. From transistors and flexible display to neuromorphic chips, the future of electronics is expected to be significantly empowered by 2D materials. In a new study published in Nano Letters titled "Pressure-Driven Metallicity in Ångström-Thickness 2D Bismuth and Layer-Selective Ohmic Contact to MoS2," researchers led by SUTD have discovered that a gentle squeeze is enough to make bismuth—one of the heaviest elements in the periodic table—switch its electrical personality. Using state-of-the-art density functional theory (DFT) simulations, the team showed that when a single layer of bismuth, only a few atoms thick, is compressed or "squeezed" between surrounding materials, the atoms reorganize from a slightly corrugated (or buckled) structure into a perfectly flat one. This structural flattening, though subtle, has dramatic electronic consequences: it eliminates the energy band gap and allows electrons to move freely, turning the material metallic.

A new transfer strategy to boost ultra-thin flexible temperature sensor performance

In the fields of intelligent health care and robotic sensing, the development of ultra-thin flexible temperature sensors serves as a core prerequisite for achieving high conformability and integration. However, a fundamental bottleneck persists: the high-temperature processes required to ensure high sensitivity are incompatible with the low thermal tolerance of flexible substrates. Consequently, it remains challenging for ultra-thin devices to simultaneously achieve high sensitivity, excellent flexibility, and long-term stability. To address this challenge, a research team from the Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made progress in the field of ultra-thin temperature sensors. The team adopted a "water-soluble sacrificial layer-assisted transfer" strategy, which resolves the process compatibility issue between high-performance sensitive materials and flexible substrates. Using this approach, they fabricated an ultra-thin flexible temperature sensor with a total thickness of only 40 micrometers.

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