Researchers at four Austrian universities, TU Wien, University of Vienna, JKU Linz, and the University of Innsbruck, have developed a new approach connecting an electron microscope to a quantum computer to process quantum information carried by electrons.
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A working transistor requires an extremely thin insulating layer known as the gate dielectric. This layer sits above the semiconductor and helps control the movement of electrons. As transistors shrink, making this insulating layer thinner can improve electrical control. The difficulty is that adding such layers to atomically thin semiconductors can disturb the delicate interface between the materials. That disruption can scatter electrons and erase some of the performance gains engineers are trying to achieve.
For years, researchers have therefore faced a difficult tradeoff. They could strengthen control over the transistor gate, or they could protect the mobility of the charge carriers moving through the device. Achieving both at once has been much harder.
Researchers at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan, working with TSMC Corporate Research, Taiwan, have now demonstrated a new way to address this problem by focusing on the interface itself.
The work, published in Nature Electronics, shows that carefully controlling the atomic boundary between a semiconductor and its insulating layer can allow the dielectric to be made extremely thin while maintaining strong electrical performance. Rather than searching for a completely different semiconductor, the researchers concentrated on the narrow region where the two materials meet, an area only a few atoms thick.
Instead of changing either the semiconductor or the gate dielectric, the NYCU researchers redesigned the interface connecting them.
The team first placed an ultrathin epitaxial aluminum layer directly onto monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). They then carefully oxidized the aluminum, producing an aluminum oxide layer about 0.42 nanometers thick. After that, they added the high κ hafnium oxide gate dielectric.
Despite being only a fraction of a nanometer thick, the engineered interface performs two important jobs.
First, it creates a smooth and continuous surface that allows the hafnium oxide to grow more uniformly over the MoS2. Second, it works as an atomic buffer that limits unwanted electrical interactions between the dielectric and the semiconductor. This protection helps electrons continue moving efficiently through the transistor channel.
In this design, the interface does more than simply keep two materials apart. It becomes a functional part of the transistor and helps the materials work together more effectively.
Using the new interface design, the researchers fabricated short-channel top-gate transistors from CVD-grown monolayer MoS2. The devices had an equivalent oxide thickness of roughly one nanometer.
Testing showed low leakage current, minimal hysteresis, and maximum transconductance of 0.45 mS μm-1 in transistors with channels measuring about 100 nanometers.
More importantly, the devices demonstrated a combination that has been difficult to achieve in atomically thin transistors: very thin dielectric scaling, strong electrostatic control, and sustained carrier transport.
Because the researchers used CVD-grown monolayer MoS2 rather than mechanically exfoliated flakes, they believe the approach brings the technology closer to materials and processes that could eventually be suitable for wafer-scale manufacturing.
The findings also point to a broader change in the way semiconductor researchers think about transistor design.
For decades, much of the effort to improve transistors has centered on discovering better semiconductor materials or making devices smaller. As transistor components approach atomic dimensions, however, the interfaces separating different materials become increasingly important.
These regions may be only a few atoms thick, yet they can strongly influence how well the materials on either side work together. The new results add to growing evidence that controlling these atomic interfaces could become as important as developing new semiconductor materials themselves.
Image – Researchers from NYCU and TSMC show that redefining the atomic boundary between materials can address a major engineering barrier restricting the development of next-generation semiconductor devices. Courtesy of: Springer Nature.
For more information:
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
https://www.nycu.edu.tw/nycu/en/index
TRUMPF, Germany, has developed the first industrial process of its kind using its HiPIMS products to coat microscopic structures in glass substrates, supporting the semiconductor industry in bringing next-generation high-performance AI processors to series production.
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Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed electro-thermo-chemical random-access memory, a technology that uses localized heating and electrical pulses to store a range of analog values instead of binary ones and zeros, making future electronics more energy efficient.
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Hitachi High-Tech Corporation, Japan, established the Innovation Center Eindhoven at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
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Innovative Circuits Engineering Inc., San Jose, Calif., a leader in semiconductor reliability testing solutions, launched its latest innovation: the eM808 bHAST system—now enhanced with in-situ monitoring capabilities previously available only on high temperature operating life systems.
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Penn State and Kurt J. Lesker Company have launched a strategic partnership to advance atomic-scale materials processing for semiconductors, advanced packaging, quantum technologies and photonics. Central to the collaboration is the new Kurt J. Lesker Company Atomic Scale Processing Center of Excellence, known as ASPIRE, at Penn State. The center will combine the company’s equipment and process expertise with Penn State’s nanofabrication, materials research and characterization capabilities to support next-generation technology development and workforce training. The partnership was formally launched Sept. 9 with the signing of a memorandum of understanding and a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Millennium Science
KJLC is a Pennsylvania-based company specializing in vacuum science and equipment used to create and shape extremely thin layers of materials. These thin films are essential components in semiconductors and other advanced technologies.
A central goal of the partnership is to develop and validate atomic-scale processing recipes, or detailed instructions for creating thin films with specific properties. These recipes could ultimately be shared with KJLC customers and academic researchers around the world.
The partnership builds on a research relationship, demonstrating the world’s first ferroelectric aluminum-scandium nitride thin films grown by plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition. The achievement highlights the role of atomic scale processing in enabling next-generation semiconductor, quantum and advanced electronic technologies, according to KJLC and Penn State leadership.
The most recent collaboration will focus on two highly precise processes: atomic layer deposition, which builds thin films a few atoms at a time, and atomic layer etching, which removes material with similar precision. That level of control is critical because even tiny differences in a material’s thickness or composition can affect how well a device performs.
“Few universities offer the combination of research expertise, characterization capabilities and nanofabrication infrastructure available at Penn State,” said Joshua Robinson, director of Penn State’s Materials Research Institute and professor of materials science and engineering. “Coupling those strengths with Kurt J. Lesker Company’s technologies and process engineers creates a unique environment where new ideas can benefit scientific discovery and advance technology development.”
Under the agreement, KJLC will loan three ultra-high purity atomic scale processing tools to the Nanofabrication Laboratory. One 200-millimeter atomic scale processing system integrates both atomic layer deposition and atomic layer etching, enabling researchers to deposit and etch materials with near-atomic precision. Together, the systems are valued at approximately $4.45 million. KJLC will retain ownership and responsibility for maintaining them. Penn State researchers will have access to the three systems for University research, joint projects with KJLC and work conducted for Penn State’s user community.
“From a business perspective, Penn State was the natural choice because of our long-standing relationship and shared commitment to advancing scientific discovery,” said Kurt Lesker IV, president and CEO of Kurt J. Lesker Company. “Through the Materials Research Institute, Penn State brings world-class researchers, advanced nanofabrication capabilities, and a collaborative environment where industry and academia work side by side to solve important challenges. Together, we are creating a center of excellence that will accelerate innovation, develop future talent, and strengthen leadership in semiconductors, advanced packaging and next generation technologies.”
The partnership will also establish workforce development programming for undergraduate and graduate students and early-career professionals, with potential activities including internships and graduate research support.
“KJLC already has considerable training programs in vacuum technologies and deposition,” Robinson said. “By connecting that industry expertise with the research happening at Penn State, we can create new training opportunities for students and the broader workforce.”
Such training opportunities will include learning from Penn State researchers and KJLC engineers, who will use the loaned equipment to develop and test new materials and processing methods for applications including quantum technologies, micro- and nano- scale sensors and mechanical devices, biomedical coatings, advanced packaging and flexible electronics.
“The future of advanced technology will be built one atomic layer at a time,” Lesker said. “By combining Penn State’s research leadership with Kurt J. Lesker Company’s vacuum and thin film expertise in atomic scale processing, we can accelerate the development of new materials and manufacturing processes that enable breakthroughs in semiconductor packaging, quantum technologies, photonics and advanced electronics. Just as importantly, this partnership helps bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world application while preparing the next generation of scientists and engineers who will drive innovation for decades to come.”
Penn State and KJLC researchers will use the systems to develop recipes specifying the materials, temperatures, timing and other conditions needed to consistently create a particular thin film or structure. The partners will develop a growing library of standardized atomic-scale processing recipes that can be shared across the research community and ultimately deployed on KJLC platforms worldwide. KJLC will also provide Penn State access to 38 processes it has already developed, and Penn State researchers will be able to draw on KJLC’s principal scientist and other technical experts while developing new ones.
Once a process is developed and refined through the partnership, KJLC could make it available to customers using its equipment elsewhere, extending work done at Penn State to researchers and companies around the world.
For more information: Communications Materials
Image: Andrew Read, Penn State senior vice president for research, right, and Kurt Lesker IV, president and CEO of Kurt J. Lesker Company, left, do a ceremonial ribbon cutting to launch the partnership between Penn State and Kurt J. Lesker Company to develop new ways to create specialized materials for next-generation technologies. Credit: Jennifer M. McCann / Penn State
Researchers at TU Wien, in collaboration with the University of Vienna, JKU Linz and the University of Innsbruck, are developing a quantum computer-assisted electron microscope designed to capture additional quantum information carried by electrons that is typically lost in conventional imaging. The approach could produce clearer images while reducing the number of electrons needed, helping protect delicate samples such as biological materials. A prototype quantum computer electron microscope based on the concept is currently under construction at TU Wien.
Using Quantum Entanglement to Get More From Each Electron
Modern electron microscopes already achieve extraordinary resolution.
“Today, we can image tiny details on the atomic scale,” says Philipp Haslinger from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien. “However, this requires a large number of electrons. And not every sample can be exposed to so many electrons without being damaged. This is often a problem, particularly when imaging biological samples such as individual proteins.”
The challenge, then, is to learn more from each electron so researchers can reduce the total number needed to produce an image.
The team proposes doing this by linking the electrons to a quantum computer built around trapped ions.
“Our idea is to combine the electrons with a quantum computer. We let them interact with ions that are held in place along the path of the electron beam,” explains Elias Pescoller, first author of the publication and a doctoral student at the Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien. “This can, for example, create quantum entanglement between the electron and the quantum computer. The electron and the ion then share a joint quantum state.”
Quantum entanglement allows two quantum systems to share information in ways that have no direct equivalent in classical physics. In this setup, an electron passing through the microscope can become entangled with an ion in the quantum computer, allowing information about the electron to be stored in the ion.
Turning Weak Signals Into Useful Information
After one electron interacts with the trapped ion, another electron can pass through and become entangled with the quantum computer as well. By repeatedly carrying out carefully designed quantum operations, the system can combine information from multiple electrons.
“If we perform very specific quantum-computing operations each time, we can optimally combine the information from several electrons so that we obtain a signal of maximum strength even though we use only a relatively small number of electrons,” says Dennis Rätzel from the Institute of Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien.
The algorithms needed to carry out this processing were developed in collaboration with Johannes Kofler’s team at JKU Linz.
The basic imaging process still relies on electrons, just as it does in a conventional electron microscope. The difference is that the quantum computer can process information that those electrons carry that would otherwise be lost.
“The electrons themselves are used to image small objects, just as in any other electron microscope. But by processing the quantum information carried by these electrons in a quantum computer, we can extract significantly more information from the process,” says Iva Březinová from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at TU Wien. “What would previously have been indistinguishable from random noise can thus become a clear signal.”
That could allow scientists to recover useful details that would be impossible to identify using ordinary electron counting alone.
“Quantum physics allows us to overcome the statistical limits that constrain conventional electron microscopes,” says Elias Pescoller.
From Mathematical Proof to a Working Microscope
So far, the researchers have shown mathematically that the new method should offer important advantages. The next challenge is to demonstrate those benefits experimentally.
At TU Wien’s University Service Center for Transmission Electron Microscopy (USTEM), researchers are preparing to integrate an ion-based quantum computer into an electron microscope. The quantum computer was developed by Philipp Schindler’s team at the University of Innsbruck.
If the system works as expected, it could open a new approach to electron microscopy in which researchers gain more information while exposing sensitive samples to fewer electrons.
“It is really exciting that, within the quantA Cluster of Excellence, we can combine the expertise in quantum information, quantum computing and electron microscopy available at the different universities in Austria. This allows us to launch a unique project,” says Thomas Juffmann from the University of Vienna.
For more infromation: University of Vienna
Image: An electron microscope capable of performing quantum computing operations using built-in ion traps. Credit: TU Wien
Rice University Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Vanessa Sanchez has received the Toyota Programmable System Innovation Fellowship to develop advanced 3D-knitted soft robotic textiles that integrate sensing, movement and mechanical functions directly into fabric. The research aims to create textiles that can adapt to users’ needs, such as enhancing mobility, improving comfort and increasing safety, with the long-term goal of making the textile itself function as a robot.
“We tend to think of fabric as something passive — something that covers, cushions or supports another device,” Sanchez said. “We’re asking what happens when the textile becomes the device itself with sensing, movement and mechanical function built directly into its structure.”
Today’s soft robotic systems often combine fabrics with separate sensors, actuators, electronics and structural components. That can make devices bulky and complicated to manufacture and can limit their ability to comfortably conform to different bodies. Sanchez’s team is taking a different approach. By carefully controlling yarn selection, stitch patterns and three-dimensional knit architecture, she aims to encode mechanical behavior into a textile as it is manufactured. Functional fibers, pneumatic channels and sensors could be integrated into the same knitted structure, allowing a fabric to bend, twist, contract or inflate while also sensing its own movement and interaction with a user.
This approach builds on years of Sanchez’s work in the field of textiles, materials science and robotics — and the unconventional path she took to get here.
Sanchez began using a sewing machine as a young child, and she initially studied fashion design as an undergraduate.
“I began college studying fashion at FIT before transferring to Cornell to study fiber science,” Sanchez said. “That shift helped me realize I could bring together my interests in design and engineering.”
She later earned graduate degrees at Harvard University, where she worked on soft robotic systems designed to assist human movement, before conducting postdoctoral research at Stanford University. Today, she directs Rice’s texlab, where she designs robotic textiles and soft wearable systems.
That combination of textile design and engineering shapes the new Toyota-supported project.
“Textiles are already extraordinarily good at interacting with the human body,” Sanchez said. “They stretch, conform, distribute forces and move with us. If we can add robotic functionality without losing those qualities, we can begin designing systems that are much more natural and comfortable for people to use.”
The 12-month project will focus first on integrating sensing and actuation — the ability to detect changes and produce movement — within the same 3D-knitted structures.
Using materials including conductive fibers, pneumatic channels and composite knitted architectures, Sanchez’s team plans to create textile modules capable of programmed sequences of motion, such as contracting, bending, twisting and inflating.
At the same time, embedded sensing could allow those structures to detect information such as strain, pressure, deformation and loading. Eventually, that capability could enable a robotic textile to sense what is happening to it and adjust its behavior in response.
Sanchez’s lab has already developed technologies featuring textile-based sensors, programmed textile actuators, morphing fabrics and knitted pneumatic actuators capable of producing specific motions based on their structure. At Rice, her group is also investigating AI-guided textile design and new manufacturing techniques for knitted robotic systems.
The fellowship will allow her to begin bringing those capabilities together into more integrated systems.
The second phase of the project will translate those textile systems into prototype technologies relevant to mobility. Possible applications include wearable devices that provide localized assistance to help a person move, seating or interior surfaces that change shape or stiffness in response to a user and soft safety structures that deploy or deform to absorb energy.
The prototypes will be developed in collaboration with Toyota researchers and evaluated for performance, sensing, manufacturability, weight, adaptability and safe interaction with people.
The research reflects a general shift toward designing robots that can operate more naturally alongside humans. For Sanchez, the project is part of a larger effort to expand what textiles can do.
“I’m continuously trying to understand the relationship between fibers and yarns and their structures so well that I can be really innovative and build something brand new,” she said. “Ultimately, I want to use textiles to create new kinds of machines and systems that can support people.”
For more information: Texlab
Image: Vanessa Sanchez in her lab at Rice.
Matergenics has deployed its hydrogen-in-steel monitoring sensor at a hydrogen-natural gas blending facility in Italy, marking the first operational use of the technology. Engineered by Techfem S.p.A., the facility blends green hydrogen into a natural gas network and is supported by continuous remote monitoring from Matergenics’ Hydrogen Solutions Division in Pittsburgh. The system uses continuous dilation measurements and HEILD-based analysis to help assess hydrogen embrittlement risks in operating steel piping.
Hydrogen blending is widely regarded as a near-term pathway for reducing the carbon intensity of existing natural gas infrastructure. However, introducing hydrogen into steel piping can increase susceptibility to hydrogen embrittlement—a degradation process in which absorbed hydrogen reduces ductility and fracture resistance and may contribute to crack initiation or accelerated crack growth without readily visible warning signs.
Conventional operating measurements, including pressure, flow, temperature, and leak detection, do not directly characterize hydrogen uptake or the evolving mechanical response of the steel. Matergenics’ monitoring technology is designed to help address this gap.
The sensor is bonded directly to the exterior of the pipe and continuously measures extremely small dimensional and strain changes associated with hydrogen interaction with the steel. The resulting data are securely transmitted to Matergenics’ Pittsburgh monitoring center, where they are evaluated using proprietary analytical methods based on HEILD—the Hydrogen-Enhanced Instability by Local Dilation framework.
HEILD relates localized, hydrogen-associated dilation and mechanical instability to the susceptibility of a specific material and component to hydrogen-assisted damage. Rather than relying solely on hydrogen pressure, exposure time, or other generalized operating parameters, the system evaluates the response of the actual steel component while it remains in service.
“For decades, the hydrogen-embrittlement community has largely had to infer risk from environmental conditions, laboratory testing, and indirect measurements,” said Dr. Michael McGuire, Chief Scientist at Matergenics. “This deployment gives us the ability to monitor the mechanical response of an operating steel pipe continuously and translate that response into actionable information for integrity management.”
The project combines Techfem’s expertise in hydrogen and hydrogen–natural gas infrastructure with Matergenics’ sensing, materials-testing, and analytical capabilities. Together, the technologies provide the facility operator with visibility into a degradation mechanism that conventional pressure, flow, and leak-monitoring systems are not designed to detect.
“This installation represents an important step toward condition-based integrity management for hydrogen infrastructure,” said Dr. Mehrooz Zamanzadeh, Founder and President of Matergenics. “Our objective is to help operators identify changes in hydrogen-related risk before they develop into cracking, leakage, or loss of containment.”
The installation builds on an ongoing hydrogen-monitoring collaboration between Matergenics and Techfem and supports Matergenics’ continuing development and validation of HEILD as a framework for evaluating hydrogen-assisted damage in ferritic, martensitic, and austenitic steels.
Matergenics and Techfem intend to evaluate the system’s in-service performance and explore its application to additional hydrogen-blending facilities, pipelines, storage systems, and other hydrogen-exposed assets.
ABOUT MATERGENICS, INC.
Matergenics, Inc. is a materials, corrosion, and failure-analysis engineering firm headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Led by Dr. Mehrooz Zamanzadeh, FAMPP and FASM, the company provides corrosion assessment, materials testing, failure analysis, structural-integrity evaluation, and remote monitoring services. Matergenics’ Hydrogen Solutions Division focuses on hydrogen embrittlement research, accelerated testing, materials qualification, and in-service structural monitoring. Its technologies include HEILD—the Hydrogen-Enhanced Instability by Local Dilation framework—and the Circumferentially Pre-Cracked Round Bar methodology for accelerated determination of threshold stress-intensity behavior, K₁ₕ, in hydrogen environments.
ABOUT TECHFEM S.p.A.
Techfem S.p.A. is an Italian engineering company with more than 40 years of experience in strategic energy infrastructure. The company delivers engineering and project management services across the hydrogen, natural gas, CO₂, and power transmission sectors, supporting the development of secure and sustainable energy systems. With over 60 hydrogen projects in its portfolio, Techfem is active throughout the hydrogen value chain, from production and blending to transport and storage, while advancing innovative solutions through participation in national and European research and development programs.
For more information: Matergenics, Inc.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built an AI model trained on 2,000 different semiconductor materials using data from a noninvasive neutron-scattering technique that can detect and classify up to six kinds of point defects in a material simultaneously, something that would be impossible using conventional techniques alone.
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Researchers from Google, Mountain View, Calif., and Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, have developed a novel failure analysis hardware and sample preparation solution that enables system-level failure analysis on mobile 3D integrated circuits.
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FormFactor, Livermore, Calif., and Keystone Microtech, Taiwan, partnership expands semiconductor probe card manufacturing and test capabilities to support advanced semiconductor applications
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Keysight Technologies, Santa Rosa, Calif., announced Keysight Multiphysics, a design and verification solution that addresses the physics interactions driving failure in modern electronic designs, featuring a structural analysis application covering drop, shock, and vibration that enables engineering teams to identify and fix problems earlier, before a prototype is built.
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As technology advances beyond traditional silicon-based electronics, organic semiconductors are emerging as a key material for innovations such as wearable sensors, implantable devices and foldable screens. Toulik Maitra, a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, is helping advance this field through computational modeling that explores how these materials behave at the molecular level. His research recently expanded through a collaboration with Germany’s Max Planck Institute, a world-renowned leader in polymer and organic electronics research, bringing the future of flexible and next-generation electronics one step closer to reality.
Silicon is an excellent semiconductor, capable of switching between conducting and blocking electricity. However, silicon atoms are locked together by covalent bonds, making them strong but also rigid.
Organic semiconductors, on the other hand, are carbon-based materials that can perform the same electronic functions as silicon but are more flexible because their molecules are held together by weak attractions called van der Waals forces.
“It’s the same force that lets a gecko stick to a smooth wall without any glue,” Maitra says.
That flexibility also makes the materials much more difficult to model accurately.
“Due to van der Waals forces, at room temperature, the molecules vibrate, causing each electron cloud to shift in response to its neighbors, or polarization,” Maitra said. “It has a large effect on how charges move through the material and interact with light.”
Capturing this behavior accurately in computer simulations is difficult, slowing the design of new organic semiconductor materials. Maitra’s goal is to computationally model the molecular behavior to design better materials before anyone steps into a lab.
During a six-month appointment as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, Maitra and his collaborators set out to capture how shifts in polarization affect charge transport and light interactions.
The international team developed a new computational framework that predicts how individual atoms respond to their molecular surroundings, enabling simulations to more accurately reflect the behavior of organic semiconductors in the real world.
The framework accounts for the unique environment surrounding each atom. It has proven more accurate than conventional methods, which assign the same electronic properties to broad categories of atoms.
It also accurately models molecules in their neutral, charged and excited states — the same conditions they experience inside a working electronic device. When combined with machine learning, the framework can quickly predict these properties for new molecules, enabling researchers to identify promising materials before synthesizing them in the laboratory.
Maitra is already applying these improved modeling techniques to his doctoral research in the laboratory of Adam Moulé, professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis. There, he studies organic semiconductor materials for organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, with a particular focus on thermally activated delayed fluorescence, or TADF, emitters and high-mobility molecules.
Currently, the highest-efficiency OLED displays often rely on rare metals such as iridium and platinum to produce bright, energy-efficient light. TADF materials offer a promising alternative, achieving similar performance with entirely organic molecules.
By more accurately predicting how those molecules will behave before they are synthesized, Maitra hopes to help researchers accelerate the search for efficient OLED materials that reduce dependence on expensive, rare-earth materials.
“I am always excited to move the field forward,” Maitra said. “If this method works, then the next thing you want to model — device performance or vibration analysis — can be done in a better way.”
Maitra will be able to continue his collaboration with the Max Planck Institute at UC Davis in the Moulé Lab thanks to a UC Davis Dissertation Fellowship, which is awarded by UC Davis Graduate Studies to support a Ph.D. student for a year toward the end of their academic career.
The fellowship gives Maitra the time to focus on publishing his research, completing his dissertation and preparing for a career advancing organic semiconductor technologies.
“I believe in this field,” Maitra said. “Working with organic semiconductors will make a better future.”
Intel Foundry has created the world’s thinnest gallium nitride chiplet, measuring just 19 micrometers thick, along with the industry’s first fully monolithic on-die digital control circuits built on a 300 millimeter GaN-on-silicon wafer.
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A research team at Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea developed an interferometric second-harmonic generation imaging approach capable of optically identifying hidden structural defects in thin films of hexagonal boron nitride, a promising material for next-generation semiconductor technologies.
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A multi-disciplinary team led by Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., has developed a material that is both tunable and efficient, marking an achievement that was one of the most elusive goals in microwave electronics.
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Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Japan, and imec, Belgium, have unveiled a high-density “local BDI” module for 3D chip stacking that allows through-silicon vias to connect through up to 500nm of bulk silicon, unlocking advanced logic and DRAM applications without needing to completely remove the silicon.
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Researchers have expanded the field of twistronics by developing a method to manufacture oxide twistronic materials at much larger scales while precisely controlling the twist angles between layered materials. Twistronics focuses on how the alignment of two-dimensional materials influences their structural and electronic properties, and this new technique could help advance research and practical applications by making these materials easier to produce and study.
“The field of twistronics was developed using 2D materials that are bonded by weak van der Waals forces,” says Ruijuan Xu, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University. “Our work here demonstrates it is possible to use layers of oxide materials that are connected by strong chemical bonds—while precisely controlling the twist angle between crystalline oxide membranes.
“The strong interlayer bonding we found between oxide layers suggests there may be entirely new interfacial phenomena to explore,” adds Xu. “We’ve demonstrated the ability to control many of the materials’ characteristics—including phase structure and domain configuration—in ways that offer new routes for designing materials and devices tailored to specific applications.”
For this work, the researchers synthesized crystalline sodium niobate (NaNbO3) membranes and used photolithography to create a set of visual markers along the perimeter of each membrane. One NaNbO3 membrane was then lifted and placed on top of another NaNbO3 membrane. The researchers monitored the alignment of the visual markers during assembly to precisely control the relative twist angle between the two layers. Once they established the desired angle, they performed a material-specific annealing process to establish strong chemical bonding between the layers.
“Scale matters for devices,” says Xu. “Because these crystalline membranes can be fabricated over large areas and transferred onto different supports, this approach provides a practical path toward twist-engineered oxide electronics.”
The researchers also used synchrotron X-ray diffraction techniques to capture what is happening at the interface between the two layers.
“We found that the bonds between the two layers are so strong that they are distorting the atomic structure of the material—creating a gradual rotation of the atomic lattice at the interface between the layers,” says Xu. “We also found changes to the phase structure of the material. It remains to be seen how this will affect material properties, but that’s something we are exploring.”
The researchers note that while this work was done using NaNbO3 as a model, the technique could be extended to other complex oxides.
“Our work demonstrates a technique for creating large-area oxide twistronic materials with controlled twist angles and a strong chemical bond between layers,” says Xu. “It’s an exciting time for oxide twistronics, with new opportunities to engineer complex oxide functionalities through twist.”
For more information: ACS Nano
A new facility at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus will give researchers and corporate partners access to a wide range of advanced materials and manufacturing tools, supporting work with cutting-edge technologies. The Biodesign Institute marked the opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and facility tours earlier this month.
Managed by the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing, or SM3, the facility houses tools that support research such as scanning electron microscopy, thermal analysis, light scattering, mechanical testing, gas permeability measurements, water uptake analysis and rheological testing to better understand and optimize material performance.
The lab also features cutting-edge additive manufacturing technologies, ranging from extrusion-based systems to light-driven 3D printers.
Among its most notable additions is the Cubicure Caligma printer, the first system of its kind in the United States capable of integrating extrusion and light-based printing at the micron scale, opening new possibilities for precision manufacturing and materials development.
The new laboratory represents the transformation of the former ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Lab — best known as the site of the university’s large-scale COVID-19 saliva testing operations — into a state-of-the-art research hub dedicated to advancing sustainable materials innovation.
The facility is already serving a growing community of researchers, with approximately 60 faculty members, students and staff from across ASU utilizing the space and its resources.
By bringing together expertise in materials science, engineering, chemistry and manufacturing, the center aims to accelerate the development of sustainable products and technologies while strengthening Arizona’s innovation ecosystem.
During the ceremony, attendees heard from Biodesign leaders and industry partners about the importance of investing in shared research infrastructure that can support both fundamental discovery and commercial translation.
“We’re focused on sustainability,” said Tim Long, director of the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing. “And these days what does that mean? That means resiliency. It means supply chain. It means using our resources more effectively. It means being more competitive as a nation, more competitive with our companies and more effectively educating our students, the future generation, the future workforce.”
The new laboratory is also expected to serve as a catalyst for expanded partnerships with leading instrument manufacturers and private industry, helping drive Arizona-based product innovation and workforce development.
Industry representatives participating in the event highlighted the value of collaborative research environments that connect academic expertise with real-world challenges.
“What this expansion does in practice is reduce friction,” said Jeff Addy, an ASU alumnus and research and development manager from Cargill Bioindustrial. “It means you can move from an idea to real data faster, ask better questions and iterate more quickly. That changes the kind of work you can do, not just how fast you can do it.”
Following the ribbon cutting, guests toured the laboratory and explored the technologies that will support the next generation of sustainable materials research and manufacturing at ASU.
For more information: Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing
Image: Industry collaborators tour the Biodesign Institute’s new shared manufacturing lab managed by the Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing on Tuesday, June 9. The facility provides access to advanced tools that support electron microscopy, thermal analysis, light scattering, mechanical testing, gas permeability, water uptake, rheology and 3D printing. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News
Toni Taylor, a Los Alamos National Laboratory fellow and physicist, recalls that early terahertz research was hindered by the lack of modulators—devices that control light’s amplitude, phase or frequency—making it difficult for this promising band to reliably carry information for communications and medical applications. Situated between microwaves and infrared light, the terahertz range is too fast for conventional electronics and too slow for traditional optics, leaving it largely unmastered compared with other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that drove advances such as radar and photonics. Because terahertz waves pass through typical modulator materials with little absorption or reflection, scientists have had limited ability to control them, creating what is known as the “terahertz gap” and leaving significant technological potential untapped.
Terahertz waves oscillate trillions of times per second, hundreds of times faster than the microwave-frequency systems used in today’s wireless networks. In principle, that behavior means they could carry vastly more information than today’s fastest consumer networks. But communications is only part of the appeal. Like x-rays, terahertz radiation can penetrate many nonmetallic materials, but unlike x-rays, it doesn’t ionize atoms, meaning it doesn’t change the materials’ structure. In theory, that makes terahertz radiation well-suited to nondestructive probing of delicate materials, from biological tissue to concealed explosives. “There just weren’t good photonics devices there,” Taylor says. “At the time, neither naturally occurring materials nor manmade alloys interacted strongly enough in that band to control it.”
By the early 2000s, when Taylor and coworkers began working in the terahertz band, the computer revolution had pushed technology to an inflection point. Moore’s Law was still busy shrinking transistors, but devices had reached dimensions small enough that quantum effects shaped performance. Advances could no longer come from simply making components smaller. To keep accelerating computation, materials had to be designed down to the level of their very atoms.
For the first time, nanoscale engineering, working at dimensions of billionths of a meter, where materials behave in fundamentally new ways, was becoming practical. Long before nano products were built, scientists could model them on supercomputers that predicted how electrons and electromagnetic waves would behave in such tiny structures. Cleanroom fabrication techniques refined by the microelectronics industry were building structures smaller than one hundred nanometers with remarkable precision, while scanning tunneling microscopes and atomic force microscopes made it possible not only to image the placements of individual atoms but, in some cases, to nudge them deliberately into place.
All of these technological factors, plus the promise of the capabilities they enabled, led the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to create the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a centerpiece facility among a national network of nanoscale research centers. Opened in 2004 and jointly operated by Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, CINT was built as a user facility, a place where scientists from around the world could propose ideas and gain access to specialized tools and expertise. Housed within this tightly integrated environment, researchers could move from theory to synthesis to fabrication to characterization—all at the nanoscale.
For researchers like Taylor, CINT turned the terahertz gap from an abstract limitation into an engineering problem. “All of the tools needed to develop the modulators were at CINT,” Taylor says. Her team’s work on the project began in earnest in 2006, when a postdoctoral researcher named Willie Padilla arrived at Los Alamos with expertise in metamaterials: artificially structured surfaces engineered to manipulate electromagnetic waves in ways natural materials cannot.
The way a material traditionally absorbs or reflects light is dictated by its atomic composition—the electronic transitions and vibrational modes built into its chemistry. Padilla’s insight was that they no longer had to rely on the electronic structure of naturally occurring materials to support a resonance at terahertz frequencies. They could engineer a material instead.
Using CINT’s modeling tools, he and his collaborators designed metallic patterns sized to resonate at terahertz frequencies: tiny, repeating loops and gaps etched into a thin film of gold. When a terahertz wave struck the patterned surface, its oscillating electric field drove the metal’s free electrons back and forth. If the geometry was right—if the loops and gaps were sized precisely for that frequency—the electrons would move in sync with the incoming wave. The energy in the terahertz waves that would otherwise have passed quietly through the material was briefly captured, scattered, or absorbed. Like radio antennas tuned to a single station, the gold resonators responded strongly only at the frequency dictated by their shape.
But this was still a passive response, like a filter or detector. The resonator device could isolate or suppress an individual frequency, but couldn’t change that frequency in real time. Without time-dependent control, it wasn’t yet useful for information transmission. To do that, Padilla, along with his coworkers Hou-Tong Chen, Richard Averitt, and Taylor had to find a way to modulate the signal itself.
The solution lay in setting the patterned metal resonator atop a semiconductor substrate. By injecting charge into that substrate—electrically or with an ultrafast optical pulse—the team temporarily increased its conductivity. That shift altered how freely the electrons in the resonators could oscillate. When the substrate became more conductive, the oscillations dissipated energy more quickly and the response weakened; when it was less conductive, the resonance sharpened. In practical terms, a static surface had become a controllable gate. A region of the spectrum long considered technologically awkward could now be modulated in real time. The work culminated in a 2006 paper demonstrating active control of terahertz radiation.
What followed was not just a device, but a new way of thinking about matter: that it could be modified at the nanoscale to realize ideas once confined to theory. Taylor’s group went on to pursue higher-speed modulators, tunable filters, polarization rotators, and broadband converters. They extended the same nanoscale design principles to problems across national security and optical communications. More recently, collaborators demonstrated structures that can generate and steer terahertz radiation with unprecedented control. That approach has contributed to advances in security imaging seen at airports, materials diagnostics, and next-generation wireless research. Recent experimental terahertz systems achieved data rates exceeding 100 gigabits per second, far beyond typical consumer wireless speeds.
Terahertz modulation is only one expression of CINT’s broader vision. Across the Center, researchers have applied the same integration of modeling, fabrication, and measurement to problems ranging from quantum dots to structural materials. Victor Klimov and Jennifer Hollingsworth engineered quantum dots whose optical gain and emission can be tuned with atomic precision, advancing solar technologies, microelectronics, and quantum information science. Other Los Alamos teams designed nanoscale defect architectures to strengthen materials and built atom-scale emitters matched to fiber-optic telecommunications bands. Each effort differs in application, but they share a methodology enabled by CINT: design at the nanoscale, fabricate precisely, measure rigorously, iterate quickly.
“We wanted to understand the materials and then design them to do the thing that we wanted them to do,” Taylor says. The science has advanced since the early days of terahertz modulators. The ambition remains the same: to design matter itself.
For more information: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Nikhil Bajaj, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, studies nonlinear systems that shift behavior once a threshold is crossed—phenomena seen across disciplines in devices that rely on bifurcation to enhance sensitivity and performance. He has received a $649,684 National Science Foundation CAREER Award to rethink how these systems are designed, moving away from trial-and-error tuning toward an approach that starts with a desired behavior and engineers backward. His framework targets applications such as micro-electro-mechanical systems, including ultrasensitive gas leak detectors capable of identifying hazardous compounds at parts-per-billion levels, as well as energy harvesters and aerospace structures.
In a system with bifurcations, a quantitative change produces a qualitative one: a change in the value of the input changes the type of outcome. Once a certain threshold is met, the system doesn’t do more of what it was doing; it instead does something different. For example, a somewhat flexible column loaded with heavier and heavier weights will compress more and more, but once a specific load is placed on it, it will move in a different way, bulging out to one side or buckling.
Today, researchers can characterize these kinds of systems using a lot of trial and error and analogies to previous systems. “Say I’m building a car, and I want it to have 400 horsepower,” Bajaj said. If he didn’t know how to hit that number, he might take any engine and keep tweaking it, tightening something here, disconnecting a part there, until it worked. And horsepower is an easy case, a smooth dial you can turn up or down. The challenge multiplies when the goal is a threshold behavior: getting a system to switch into a new kind of motion at exactly the right input, and not a moment before.
“Designing in bifurcation behavior can feel a bit like working in the dark,” Bajaj said. Even so, the field has made remarkable progress. Across nonlinear systems, libraries of relationships have accumulated for many decades as researchers test inputs and observe outputs via theory and experiment. They’ve found that systems with bifurcations of all kinds (a wing vibrating erratically at speed, a material buckling under pressure, a neuron firing in the brain) seem to be governed by similar principles. The equations aren’t identical, but when systems engineers compare notes, they find meaningful similarities behind the different variables and outputs.
“We play the same mathematical games, just on different fields,” Bajaj said. At a nonlinear dynamics conference, he might have a specific engineering question on his mind. “But then I could run into someone doing the same thing on a biological system and I think, ‘I can use their method to apply to my problem.’”
The award also supports an education plan that spans the length of the pipeline. Bajaj will carry the science of nonlinear behavior (the buckling and the sudden shifts that turn up everywhere from bridges to neurons) to K–12 students and the public through science center and library exhibits, and will fold the same design methods into undergraduate and graduate coursework. A layered mentorship model reaching students at different stages aims to broaden participation in STEM, giving newcomers both a way in and a reason to stay.
Bajaj will use his CAREER Award to develop a unified computational framework for designing nonlinear systems from a desired behavior, rather than discovering their behavior through trial and error. “I want to pick all my parameters, all the knobs I can turn, so that it does the things I want it to do and not necessarily the things that are undesirable.” The framework is intentionally general; he will demonstrate the approaches on small and large scales, from MEMS gas sensors at the micrometer scale to flutter in aircraft wings.
For more information: U.S. National Science Foundation
Physicists at UC Santa Cruz and partner institutions in California and New Mexico have developed a new detection system designed to improve next-generation particle accelerators, enabling more precise studies of fundamental biological and chemical processes and supporting advances in materials science and energy research. The effort, led by the Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration, which includes two University of California campuses and three U.S. national laboratories, addresses the growing need for high-rate beam diagnostics as accelerator performance increases from 120 pulses per second to as many as 1 million pulses per second, a jump that strains existing diagnostic systems.
“It really highlights the power of collaboration between universities and national laboratories,” said Bruce Schumm, the Long Family Professor of Experimental Physics. “If you took away Lawrence Berkeley Lab, if you took away Los Alamos, if you took away UC Davis, any of those, the whole thing would have fallen apart.”
The fruits of this years-long collaboration are nothing less than the best-performing high-bandwidth particle detection system built to date. The system combines artificial diamonds, custom microchips, and cutting-edge assembly techniques into a compact detector designed for measuring the properties of the beams shot by advanced accelerators like the Linac Coherent Light Source II at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park.
As next-generation particle accelerators continue to develop, they will have faster and faster bursts of charged particles that are close to each other in time. This means the researchers using them will need to create new, faster ways to measure these beams and control their properties.
“Nobody was building things that can measure, diagnose the beams and help control the accelerator, and also help the experimenters to unravel the data,” said Schumm.
At these high rates of beam repetition—eventually reaching beyond one billion times per second—existing detection systems fail. To overcome that barrier, the Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration set out to redesign the entire detection chain from the sensor material itself, to the electronics used to read out the signal.
“It required developing a new approach to processing the signal, and also a new integrated circuit chip that we designed ourselves and then characterized,” said Schumm. “This is the first time we put it all together and put it into a beam.”
The detector’s first full accelerator test took place last July at SLAC, where researchers exposed their system to bursts of electrons lasting approximately one picosecond.
The team collected thousands of beam pulses under varying operating conditions and found that the detector consistently produced clean, sharply defined signals about one-eight of a nanosecond long, across a wide dynamic range.
“It performed extremely well, better than we expected,” said Schumm. “And not only that, but if we compare the performance to our pure calculation expectations, they agree with stunning accuracy.”
These first tests are just the beginning, with the second version of the detection system currently in testing and development for fall 2026. These tests will use a new version of the integrated circuit chip that has been specifically designed to read out the tiny diamond sensor, and is expected to provide an even faster signal response than the version tested last summer.
In the near future, the team also hopes to make the detector easier for non-specialist laboratories and operate as a “plug-and-play” diagnostic system. And beyond next-generation accelerators, this new system could potentially be applicable in high-energy physics, advanced laser-control systems, and fusion-energy development.
“The more and more that we look at things, the more and more we need to understand things at the atomic scale,” said Schumm. “We need to understand how things evolve—how things change over very, very fast time scales.”
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of High Energy Physics, and UC National Laboratory Fees Research Program. This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a DOE user facility operated by Los Alamos and Sandia national labs.
For more information: Physical Review Accelerators and Beams
Image: The detection system along with associated hardware for electronic conditioning and control. Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta.
Diseases affecting moving organs such as the heart and lungs require dynamic imaging rather than static scans, yet limitations in current MRI technology often hinder early detection and diagnosis. Traditional MRI sensors are costly, rigid, and unable to conform closely to the body, reducing image quality and flexibility. To address this, researchers at the University of Southern California developed a low-cost, silver-ink MRI coil that can be 3D printed in under 10 minutes for patient-specific use. The coil costs about $30 in materials — significantly less than traditional models — and delivers up to four times higher image resolution, improving access to more reliable dynamic imaging.
USC researchers, Yasser Khan and Krishna Nayak teamed up to develop a new silver-ink based MRI coil that costs about $30 in consumable materials, compared with at least thousands of dollars for industry-standard coils, and delivers up to four times higher image resolution. The coils can also be 3D printed in real time in under 10 minutes, enabling patient-specific customization.
The study has removed key barriers in dynamic imaging and represents a major breakthrough in MRI technology, with broad applications in clinical settings such as pediatrics and cardiology.
The work was made possible by bringing together two researchers from USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing with expertise in wearable sensors for precision health and MRI imaging: Khan, an assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and with joint appointments in the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering, who leads Khan Lab; and Nayak, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, also with a joint appointment in biomedical engineering, who leads the Dynamic Imaging Science Center (DISC). The research was also spearheaded by Félix Muñoz, a student they co-advised, as well as Ye Tian, a research assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The team also included Prof. Min-gu Kim, an assistant professor of medical engineering at Yonsei University in Korea.
John Wood, a close collaborator from the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, emphasized that this is a game-changer, noting that MRI screening is a platform technology essential for detecting undiagnosed conditions in patients, including children and infants. He added that coil sensors play a critical role in diagnostic accuracy and clinical decision-making.
Like cameras that detect light waves to form images, MRI scanners process and create images or videos using radiofrequency (RF) signals.
The visual data is made possible with MRI “coils,” which are specialized antennas placed close to the bohiiidy part being imaged to detect weak radiofrequency signals emitted by tissues, acting as the receiver for producing high-resolution images.
In the MRI world, the equivalent of camera resolution is called signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To capture motion in MRI scans, specialized low-field MRI (0.55T) is used to enable dynamic, real-time imaging of motion-intensive processes by leveraging reduced susceptibility artifacts and faster data acquisition.
However, capturing video is particularly difficult at low magnetic field strengths (0.55T) because the signal is inherently weaker, which leads to lower SNR, and consequently lower resolution. Low SNR reduces image quality, making it more difficult for physicians to make accurate clinical assessments.
Today’s standard commercialized coils face many challenges, with low comformity being the biggest limitation. Current coils, typically made of copper, are rigid and follow a one-size-fits-all design. They cannot maintain the close contact required to recover enough signal for high-quality, video-rate imaging. The closer the sensors are to the signal source, the clearer the “picture,” and the closer a coil is to the anatomy, the better the resolution because proximity increases signal strength.
Existing MRI coil arrays are also expensive, priced between $10,000 and $50,000 each.
These high costs are driven by complex manufacturing processes, proprietary markups and rigid, specialized construction that can take significant time to produce. This cost and manufacturing complexity reinforce rigid designs as the commercial standard, making personalization difficult and continuing to limit imaging accuracy.
The limitations of current MRI technologies heavily affect babies and children, as Wood explained that existing coils are designed for adults and then scaled down for children, a process that often fails to accommodate the rapid anatomical changes in growing infants. This sizing mismatch makes MRI screening less accurate in pediatric patients. He also noted that “an infant’s heart can be as small as a walnut,” requiring a coil that is equally small and well-fitted to produce accurate results—something that current, non-customizable coil designs cannot adequately provide.
In the study, Khan’s team aims to tackle the low SNR problem by designing coils that better fit the skin, allowing sensors to be closer to the body.
The lab first experimented with innovative materials that could maintain strong signal performance while being flexible enough to conform to the body like human skin—a longstanding challenge in MRIs for dynamic imaging.
A major limitation with flexible or printed conductors is that they typically have lower conductivity than solid copper, which introduces resistive losses and reduces signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). On the other hand, current industry-standard copper coils lack the flexibility needed to maintain close contact with the body. As high conductivity is key for strong SNR, most flexible materials have historically failed to deliver imaging performance comparable to copper.
Khan’s lab identified silver as an optimal material as it offers conductivity comparable to copper while enabling flexibility when printed onto soft, rubber-like substrates such as thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). The researchers tested various silver inks and selected one formulation, FS0142, that achieved approximately 95% of the signal efficiency of a standard solid copper coil—the first time researchers are able to successfully address the conductivity challenge while maintaining flexibility for dynamic imaging at lower field.
The silver ink is combined with a specialized binder that makes it stretchable, allowing the printed coil to stretch between 5% and 10%, closely matching the natural stretchability of human skin. This enables the coils to wrap tightly around complex anatomical structures, such as the wrist, while maintaining consistent contact.
These new coils, which are as soft and stretchable as human skin, overcome the longstanding tradeoff between rigidity and conductivity. By ensuring a conformal interface where the coil remains in constant contact with the body, the design can effectively replace traditional copper coils while significantly improving imaging performance.
The new coils are also drastically cheaper in both material cost and manufacturing, dropping the price of a standard coil from as much as $50,000 to about $120 per coil.
Muñoz explained that this is partly because the quantity of material needed per coil in his team’s study is extremely small, bringing the consumable cost to roughly $30 per element, despite silver being an expensive and precious metal.
The other key aspect contributing to the low cost is the lab’s automated workflow, which enables coils to be completely 3D printed. Unlike traditional coil manufacturing, which requires complex machinery, proprietary processes and intricate assembly steps that are costly, labor-intensive, the new coils introduced in the study can be produced in as little as eight minutes per element.
These coils are designed using standard Gerber files—the same format used to manufacture circuit boards—allowing for a fully digital workflow. By using automated tools such as the Voltera NOVA printer, a direct-ink-write system, the need for manual routing or complex housing assembly is eliminated, enabling rapid digital fabrication.
This innovation not only reduces cost but also expands the potential for MRI to become more accessible, instead of a limited, high-cost resource. The simple, low-cost, real-time production of these coils allows for on-demand manufacturing tailored to specific patients or body parts, further addressing the longstanding challenge in customization. This makes it possible to create coils of varying sizes, including those small enough for infants.
Because the coils are inexpensive and can be analyzed using low-cost, portable tools, the technology could expand access to high-quality MRI in rural or resource-limited settings worldwide.
This work was made possible through a unique collaboration at the University of Southern California, where the newly developed coils could be directly tested on a rare high-performance low-field MRI system—creating an environment that enables proprietary research, innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
A key advantage is the close partnership between Yasser Khan’s lab, which developed the coils, and the Dynamic Imaging Science Center. The center houses a highly specialized MRI scanner: a 0.55 T low-field prototype, a modified 1.5 T Siemens MAGNETOM Aera system, that is now the only one of its kind still operating in the world.
The scanner at DISC offers several technical advantages that make it an ideal match for the new flexible coil technology. Its advanced gradient system enables extremely fast scans, which are essential for capturing high-quality, video-rate dynamic imaging. At the same time, like most low-field MRI systems, the scanner at DISC suffers from lower signal. The flexible coils developed in this study address that limitation by improving signal capture and image quality.
The study’s MRI coils have generated strong interest among physicians. Khan said the team’s goal is to move the coils from the lab into clinical settings, with patient testing as a key next step.
Nayak identified pediatric lung imaging as a likely first clinical application to be tested, with John Wood expressing strong interest in eventually adopting the technology for patient care.
“It starts with a signal,” Wood emphasized, noting that regardless of the medical condition, the diagnostic process begins with signal and image quality. He said the study introduces significantly improved signal strength, which could enhance MRI as a platform technology across many diseases and help physicians make more accurate clinical judgments.
Wood emphasized that the technology could be especially impactful for the smallest and most fragile patients, including premature infants. An infant’s heart is extremely small and beats rapidly, making it traditionally difficult to image. Improving signal by bringing the “lens”—the coil—closer to the body allows for clearer visualization of these tiny, fast-moving structures. Screening is a critical first step in identifying conditions in infants, who are more vulnerable to heart and lung diseases or structural abnormalities that require accurate imaging.
Wood also envisions new diagnostic pathways for common infant conditions, including monitoring lung development in bronchopulmonary dysplasia, evaluating swallowing function to prevent aspiration, and studying gastrointestinal malformations.
Muñoz also highlighted applications in wrist injuries, which require clear dynamic imaging of moving joints to identify conditions. In testing, the team’s wrist coil arrays achieved four times higher contrast and five times greater sharpness than commercial coils, allowing clinicians to resolve fine structures such as carpal ligaments that were previously difficult to see.
While the coils were developed to address challenges in dynamic imaging, Wood sees broader applications in standard, still-image MRI scans across a range of clinical settings.
For more information: Nature Communications
Image: The study’s new MRI coils. (Photo Credit: USC Khan Lab)
A sheet of twisted carbon nanotubes has revealed a long-suspected but previously unmeasured capability, as researchers at Rice University created highly ordered films of chiral nanotubes — carbon cylinders with left- or right-handed twists — that can convert the color of light at rates two to three orders of magnitude greater than conventional materials. The findings confirm decades-old theoretical predictions and suggest ultrathin nanotube films could advance faster optical communications, flexible photonic chips and light-based computing systems that largely remain in early stages.
Since their discovery in the 1990s, carbon nanotubes have been touted as carriers of enormous technological potential due to their tunable conductivity, high mechanical strength, flexibility and ultralow weight. However, they are also difficult to purify and align into larger material architectures.
This holds true for chiral CNTs, whose “handedness” makes them especially difficult to work with.
“Typically, when we have a macroscopic ensemble of carbon nanotubes, half of them are right-handed and the other half are left-handed,” said Junichiro Kono, a senior researcher on the study. “So, their chiral properties cancel each other out.”
That cancellation effect has prevented researchers from measuring one of the material’s most anticipated properties, second harmonic generation (SHG), which occurs when two light waves pass through a material and combine into one new wave with twice the frequency and half the wavelength. For example, due to SHG, two infrared light waves invisible to the human eye can be converted into visible light.
“Theory predicts chiral CNT should be particularly good at such conversion,” said Hanyu Zhu, a Rice materials scientist who led the study alongside Kono. “However, no one was able to quantify this ability because it requires high-quality, pure chiral CNT crystal.”
The Rice-led team solved that challenge by isolating nanotubes with a single handedness – a step carried out by the group of Kazuhiro Yanagi at Tokyo Metropolitan University – aligning them in the same direction and assembling them into thin films spanning several centimeters.
“We successfully made a wafer of film packed closely with chiral CNTs that showed uniform optical properties,” said Kono, director of the Smalley-Curl Institute at Rice and Karl F. Hasselmann Professor in Engineering, professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and nanoengineering, and physics and astronomy.
When illuminated with laser pulses, the chiral CNT films produced a “giant” SHG response thanks to their one-dimensional structure, where “one-dimensional” describes materials with two dimensions on the order of a nanometer and a third, much larger, dimension that gives rise to wire- or tubelike architectures.
This structure intensifies interactions between light and matter, particularly through coupled electron-hole states known as excitons. The importance of excitons in the SHG process was theorized by two team members, Vasili Perebeinos at the University at Buffalo and Riichiro Saito at Tohoku University.
“For the first time, we were able to make a more accurate prediction of one-dimensional second-order nonlinear optical response and experimentally demonstrated it,” said Zhu, associate chair and professor of materials science and nanoengineering.
SHG already plays an important role in laser technology and optoelectronic systems. The stronger the SHG effect is, the smaller the devices can be to control and convert light for technology. Chiral CNTs not only outperform materials currently in use in terms of SHG, but they are also flexible, widening the range of applications they could serve.
“CNT is a promising flexible semiconductor for electronics and photonics,” Zhu said. “The film may be easily integrated with silicon photonics for optical information processing and communication.”
For more information: ACS Nano
Image: Hanyu Zhu is the William Marsh Rice Chair and associate professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)
Researchers from St. Olaf College and Syracuse University have built mechanical computers made entirely of common materials that can perform simple calculations without electricity or batteries. Led by St. Olaf College physics professor Joey Paulsen, the team used steel springs and bars to create devices that store and process information by physically responding to motion and force. One machine counts how many times it is moved, another determines whether it has been pushed an odd or even number of times, and a third remembers whether it experienced a medium or large force, demonstrating that everyday materials can both retain memory and perform basic computation.
“We now have a rational way of building these machines that can perform simple computations without a computer chip or a power source,” Paulsen said.
Key findings from the research include:
“Our results are one step towards designing materials that can sense their environment, make a decision, and then respond,” said Paulsen. “Frequently called smart materials, what we learned could help improve people’s lives by having more responsive artificial limbs or tactile rooms.”
Paulsen recommends that future research on mechanical computers focus on understanding their limitations and scalability. Under his leadership, St. Olaf students are currently testing how the state of one rotor affects its interaction with a second rotor –– and potentially a third. This research will continue in the coming months, with opportunities for students to participate through the college’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) program.
For more information: Nature Communications
Image: St. Olaf College students Faten Abu Al Ardat ‘27 and Harry Maakestad ‘26 work on building the mechanical computer.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed an artificial intelligence-based method that uses large language models, similar to ChatGPT, to help chemical engineers discover and manufacture new materials, potentially accelerating efforts such as converting carbon dioxide into fuel. The approach allows researchers to describe desired materials in natural language, receive AI-generated recommendations for experimental procedures, and iteratively refine those experiments by feeding results back into the model. By lowering technical barriers to using AI in catalysis research, the method aims to speed experimentation, improve accessibility and advance materials discovery.
“We’re able to leverage the pre-trained knowledge of large language models and well-established statistical methods for materials discovery to help us as researchers navigate large experimental design spaces more efficiently,” says Marc Porosoff, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering.
Porosoff likens the new AI method to describing a cup of coffee, noting that someone could describe the coffee by its taste, color, and aroma, or by the type of beans, grind size, apparatus, and water temperature used to make the brew. Both representation methods describe the same cup of coffee, but the second approach gives you a recipe to reproduce it that others can easily replicate.
Porosoff and his team are applying the same principle to catalysts for energy applications, using language-based representations to describe materials not just by their properties, but by the steps needed to create them.
To build on their success, the US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced it will provide nearly $3 million in funding to apply the URochester team’s method toward creating catalysts for the production of fuel from abundant materials, specifically methanol and ethanol from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Porosoff will lead a multi-institution project team that includes URochester, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, A*STAR Institute of Sustainability for Chemicals, Energy and Environment (ISCE2) in Singapore, and OxEon Energy, a small business based in Salt Lake City.
Leveraging the power of LLMs
Traditional AI methods for materials discovery typically use a strategy called Bayesian optimization to identify and design the best candidates. But the result is complex numerical data about a material’s structure, which requires deep expertise to use effectively. The new LLM method instead produces a set of procedures that researchers can easily understand, execute, and verify to determine if the experiment’s output matches the predicted results.
This can be extremely useful for working with complex materials such as trimetallic catalysts, which are made of three metals.
“Our method reduces the technical barrier associated with using Bayesian optimization, which is a well-established method for efficiently exploring large and complicated parameter spaces,” says Shane Michtavy, a URochester chemical engineering PhD student who helped develop the AI method, synthesize materials, and run the chemical reactions described in the paper. “Using pre-trained LLMs allows users to explore using less data than traditional models, as they are deployed in a frozen state with built-in knowledge of the physical world and catalysis.”
The paper shows how the researchers applied the method to several live experiments, including one to identify catalysts for turning carbon dioxide and hydrogen into carbon monoxide and water using trimetallic catalysts made from low-cost metals. Porosoff says that there are about 360,000 possible experiments that could have been run to find the ideal catalyst, but by using procedures produced by the AI model and providing it with the results from the experiments, they were able to find an ideal candidate in just ten experiments.
The study was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Department of Energy. Additional authors included Mayk Caldas, technical staff at Edison Scientific.
Next steps
Now that they have shown the model works as a proof of concept in the lab, Porosoff aims to take the method further using the funding announced through ARPA-E’s Catalytic Application Testing for Accelerated Learning Chemistries via High-throughput Experimentation and Modeling Efficiently (CATALCHEM-E) program.
“Right now, it takes a decade or longer to go from conceptualizing a new catalyst to testing it in a lab to putting it in a real reactor,” says Porosoff. “The CATALCHEM-E program aims to cut that by an order of magnitude to a single year, and we think using AI with text-based representations will be a big factor in shortening the development cycle.”
Porosoff and his collaborators will first demonstrate their workflow on carbon dioxide-to-methanol and then extend the process to higher alcohols such as ethanol, which is a key additive for gasoline and used in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and many other applications. Ultimately, they hope to commercially deploy the model for industries to create catalysts to synthesize alcohols for fuel.
For more information: ACS Central Science
University of Michigan engineers have found that the light in OLED displays comes from nanoscale hotspots—some of which flicker—rather than from a perfectly uniform surface, a behavior that could shorten device lifespans by causing certain areas to carry more current and burn out faster. The studysuggests that these uneven emission patterns may also affect the performance of organic electronics such as solar cells and transistors. As a potential fix, researchers propose using crystalline instead of amorphous structures to improve durability. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and Universal Display Corp.
Charge rivers in hilly OLED energy landscapes
“The calculations that motivated us to look for this are actually pretty old. In the mid-2000s, people were predicting what they called a current channeling phenomenon,” said Chris Giebink, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and also senior author of the study. “You could liken it to a hilly landscape. The electrons, or charge carriers, that move through the device tend to want to follow the lowest energy pathways, so they’ll travel along the valleys.”
Charge carriers come in two flavors, electrons and positively charged “holes,” which run in opposite directions through the landscape. Where those rivers cross, light-emitting molecules convert electron-hole pairs into photons, or particles of light.
Because some valleys are deeper than others, they tend to support high-traffic rivers of charge carriers, with densities that are thought to be 10 to 100 times higher than the rest of the material. In contrast, crystalline materials are more uniform. Their landscape is flatter, leading the charge carriers to spread out more evenly, reducing the hotspot effect.
Spotting nanoscale hotspots with superresolution
Theory suggests that the hotspots are just a few tens of nanometers across. They appear as graininess in images from an optical microscope, which is limited to details of a couple hundred nanometers or bigger.
“An initial concern was whether we were seeing a microscope artifact,” said Joshua Springsteen, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering and first author of the study. “We examined the same area of the device with our microscope using both photoluminescence and electroluminescence, confirming that it was an electrical phenomenon.”
Because some of the lights flicker and aren’t always in sync, Springsteen could take a video of the device and run it through software that keyed in on the changes in brightness when one hotspot switched off while another stayed on. This technique, called superresolution optical fluctuation imaging, helped the team confirm that the hotspots were smaller than half the wavelength of the green light they emitted.
The researchers believe the blinking is due to charge carriers that are temporarily trapped in dips in the energy landscape. When that happens, they act more like dams, repelling other charge carriers, which seek alternate routes and cause downstream hotspots to go dark. Eventually, the charge carrier absorbs enough heat to pop back out of the dip, and the original hotspot lights up again. Because the flickering hotspots aren’t in sync, the human eye perceives amorphous OLEDs as glowing steadily.
To confirm that they had the mechanism right, the team used those earlier calculations that showed where charge-carrier rivers flow and meet. Springsteen took these theoretical freeze-frames and processed them to mimic the way the hotspots would have been blurred by the superresolution microscopy technique they used. These modified modeling images resembled the experimental images well enough that the team is confident they were seeing the hotspots.
The device was built in the Lurie Nanofabrication Facility and studied at the Michigan Center for Materials Characterization, both of which are operated and maintained with support from indirect cost allocations in federal grants.
For more information: Michigan Center for Materials Characterization
Image: Hotspots appear in an optical microscope image examining the surface of a green OLED, processed to quantify brightness. These hotspots may limit the lifetimes of amorphous OLEDs. Image: Joshua Springsteen, Optoelectronic Components and Materials Group, University of Michigan.
MIT physicists have used a new imaging technique to observe terahertz-frequency vibrations—described as quantum “jiggles”—inside a superconducting fluid for the first time, revealing behavior that was previously undetectable. By shining terahertz light, which probes matter differently than optical, infrared or X-ray wavelengths, the team captured inherent quantum motions within the material, opening a new window into the fundamental properties of superconductors.
Terahertz light is a form of energy that lies between microwaves and infrared radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum. It oscillates over a trillion times per second — just the right pace to match how atoms and electrons naturally vibrate inside materials. Ideally, this makes terahertz light the perfect tool to probe these motions.
But while the frequency is right, the wavelength — the distance over which the wave repeats in space — is not. Terahertz waves have wavelengths hundreds of microns long. Because the smallest spot that any kind of light can be focused into is limited by its wavelength, terahertz beams cannot be tightly confined. As a result, a focused terahertz beam is physically too large to interact effectively with microscopic samples, simply washing over these tiny structures without revealing fine detail.
The scientists report that they have developed a new terahertz microscope that compresses terahertz light down to microscopic dimensions. This pinpoint of terahertz light can resolve quantum details in materials that were previously inaccessible.
The team used the new microscope to send terahertz light into a sample of bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, or BSCCO (pronounced “BIS-co”) — a material that superconducts at relatively high temperatures. With the terahertz scope, the team observed a frictionless “superfluid” of superconducting electrons that were collectively jiggling back and forth at terahertz frequencies within the BSCCO material.
“This new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before,” says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT.
By using terahertz light to probe BSCCO and other superconductors, scientists can gain a better understanding of properties that could lead to long-coveted room-temperature superconductors. The new microscope can also help to identify materials that emit and receive terahertz radiation. Such materials could be the foundation of future wireless, terahertz-based communications, that could potentially transmit more data at faster rates compared to today’s microwave-based communications.
“There’s a huge push to take Wi-Fi or telecommunications to the next level, to terahertz frequencies,” says Alexander von Hoegen, a postdoc in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and lead author of the study. “If you have a terahertz microscope, you could study how terahertz light interacts with microscopically small devices that could serve as future antennas or receivers.”
In addition to Gedik and von Hoegen, the study’s MIT co-authors include Tommy Tai, Clifford Allington, Matthew Yeung, Jacob Pettine, Alexander Kossak, Byunghun Lee, and Geoffrey Beach, along with collaborators at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Brookhaven National Lab.
Hitting a limit
Terahertz light is a promising yet largely untapped imaging tool. It occupies a unique spectral “sweet spot”: Like microwaves, radio waves, and visible light, terahertz radiation is nonionizing and therefore does not carry enough energy to cause harmful radiation effects, making it safe for use in humans and biological tissues. At the same time, much like X-rays, terahertz waves can penetrate a wide range of materials, including fabric, wood, cardboard, plastic, ceramics, and even thin brick walls.
Owing to these distinctive properties, terahertz light is being actively explored for applications in security screening, medical imaging, and wireless communications. In contrast, far less effort has been devoted to applying terahertz radiation to microscopy and the illumination of microscopic phenomena. The primary reason is a fundamental limitation shared by all forms of light: the diffraction limit, which restricts spatial resolution to roughly the wavelength of the radiation used.
With wavelengths on the order of hundreds of microns, terahertz radiation is far larger than atoms, molecules, and many other microscopic structures. As a result, its ability to directly resolve microscale features is fundamentally constrained.
“Our main motivation is this problem that, you might have a 10-micron sample, but your terahertz light has a 100-micron wavelength, so what you would mostly be measuring is air, or the vacuum around your sample,” von Hoegen explains. “You would be missing all these quantum phases that have characteristic fingerprints in the terahertz regime.”
Zooming in
The team found a way around the terahertz diffraction limit by using spintronic emitters — a recent technology that produces sharp pulses of terahertz light. Spintronic emitters are made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers. When a laser illuminates the multilayered structure, the light triggers a cascade of effects in the electrons within each layer, such that the structure ultimately emits a pulse of energy at terahertz frequencies.
By holding a sample close to the emitter, the team trapped the terahertz light before it had a chance to spread, essentially squeezing it into a space much smaller than its wavelength. In this regime, the light can bypass the diffraction limit to resolve features that were previously too small to see.
The MIT team adapted this technology to observe microscopic, quantum-scale phenomena. For their new study, the team developed a terahertz microscope using spintronic emitters interfaced with a Bragg mirror. This multilayered structure of reflective films successively filters out certain, undesired wavelengths of light while letting through others, protecting the sample from the “harmful” laser which triggers the terahertz emission.
As a demonstration, the team used the new microscope to image a small, atomically thin sample of BSCCO. They placed the sample very close to the terahertz source and imaged it at temperatures close to absolute zero — cold enough for the material to become a superconductor. To create the image, they scanned the laser beam, sending terahertz light through the sample and looking for the specific signatures left by the superconducting electrons.
“We see the terahertz field gets dramatically distorted, with little oscillations following the main pulse,” von Hoegen says. “That tells us that something in the sample is emitting terahertz light, after it got kicked by our initial terahertz pulse.”
With further analysis, the team concluded that the terahertz microscope was observing the natural, collective terahertz oscillations of superconducting electrons within the material.
“It’s this superconducting gel that we’re sort of seeing jiggle,” von Hoegen says.
This jiggling superfluid was expected, but never directly visualized until now. The team is now applying the microscope to other two-dimensional materials, where they hope to capture more terahertz phenomena.
“There are a lot of the fundamental excitations, like lattice vibrations and magnetic processes, and all these collective modes that happen at terahertz frequencies,” von Hoegen says. “We can now resonantly zoom in on these interesting physics with our terahertz microscope.”
For more information: Nature
