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Category: materials

A multidisciplinary team at the University of California, Berkeley, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed a stretchable, self-healing lithium battery that remains stable after 500 charge/discharge cycles. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how they developed the battery and possible uses for it.

Over the past several years, scientists have been developing batteries for different types of applications. One such type is the stretchable battery, which could be used in wearable electronics. Recently, a team at Linköping University announced that they had developed a fluid battery that can take any shape, allowing for its use in a wide variety of applications. In this new study, the team at UC Berkeley has developed a that also heals itself.

To make the , the research team started with a zwitterionic polymer that had both a positive and . With such polymers, water molecules bond with the charged parts while the lithium ions are attracted by the negative parts of plastic. The arrangement allows water to be tightly bound in the battery, reducing the risk of it splitting when voltage is applied, while still allowing lithium ions to be released when desired.

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“In solid matter, heat is transferred both by mobile charge carriers and by vibrations of the atoms in the crystal lattice,” Garmroudi says, emphasizing that researchers have devised advanced techniques to engineer thermoelectric materials with exceptionally low thermal conductivity over the past few decades.

“In thermoelectric materials, we mainly try to suppress heat transport through the lattice vibrations, as they do not contribute to energy conversion,” he adds.

Garmroudi recalls developing the novel hybrid materials during his research stay in Tsukuba, Japan, supported by the Lions Award and carried out at the National Institute for Materials Science as part of his work at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology).

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🚀 Q: What are the key features of SpaceX’s new flame trench at Pad B? A: The 80% complete flame trench features 5 diverter supports, 2 flame buckets, and water pipes for cooling and exhaust management, enabling rapid Starship launch turnarounds by up to 70% compared to pads without a trench.

🔥 Q: How does the flame trench manage Superheavy booster exhaust? A: It channels 3,000°C exhaust from 33 Raptor engines using a 10-20m deep, 10-20m wide, refractory-lined concrete channel with a steel deflector to reduce recoil damage by 60%.

💧 Q: What role does water play in the flame trench system? A: The trench uses 1M L water per launch to cool the trench, absorb 10–20 MJ/m² heat flux, and reduce 30–50% acoustic energy, preventing structural cracks or instability of the rocket.

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Traditionally, magnetic materials have been divided into two main categories: ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Over the past few years, however, physicists have uncovered the existence of altermagnets, a new type of magnetic material that exhibits features of both antiferromagnets and ferromagnets.

Altermagnets are that have no net magnetization (i.e., their atomic magnetic moments cancel each other out), like antiferromagnets. Yet they also break spin degeneracy (i.e., the usual energy equality between spin-up and spin-down electrons), similarly to ferromagnets.

Researchers at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Southern University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and other institutes in China recently set out to realize a layered altermagnet that can generate non-collinear spin current. The room-temperature metallic altermagnet they unveiled was outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics.

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An international research team led by Mayukh Kumar Ray, Mingxuan Fu, and Satoru Nakatsuji from the University of Tokyo, along with Collin Broholm from Johns Hopkins University, has discovered the anomalous Hall effect in a collinear antiferromagnet.

More strikingly, the anomalous Hall effect emerges from a non-Fermi liquid state, in which electrons do not interact according to conventional models. The discovery not only challenges the textbook framework for interpreting the anomalous Hall effect but also widens the range of antiferromagnets useful for information technologies.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Researchers have identified antiferromagnetism in a real icosahedral quasicrystal, reigniting interest in the quest to uncover antiferromagnetic quasicrystals. Quasicrystals (QCs) are a remarkable class of solid materials characterized by a unique atomic structure. Unlike conventional crystals, w

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In a physics first, a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a way to make beams of neutrons travel in curves. These Airy beams (named for English scientist George Airy), which the team created using a custom-built device, could enhance neutrons’ ability to reveal useful information about materials ranging from pharmaceuticals to perfumes to pesticides—in part because the beams can bend around obstacles.

“We’ve known about these strange, self-steering wave patterns for a while, but until now, no one had ever made them with neutrons,” said NIST’s Michael Huber, one of the paper’s authors. “This opens up a whole new way to control neutron beams, which could help us see inside materials or explore some big questions in physics.”

A paper announcing the findings appears in Physical Review Letters.

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