X-ray microscopy overcomes previous limits

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced that a joint research team led by Professor YongKeun Park of the Department of Physics and Dr. Jun Lim of the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory has succeeded in developing a core technology that can overcome the resolution limitations of existing x-ray microscopes.

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New invention for more efficient atomic force microscopes

Researchers at Vienna University of Technology, Austria, developed an atomic force microscope sensor element of with a customized electronic circuit built directly into the tip whose signal directly provides information about the state of the tip, producing a more compact, simpler to process, cheaper technology with precision just as good as with previous devices.

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Predicting grain growth for better materials

New research is helping scientists better understand how microstructures change, or undergo grain growth, at high temperatures, thus determining properties such as hardness. A team of materials scientists and applied mathematicians developed a mathematical model that more accurately describes such microstructures by integrating data that can be identified from highly magnified images taken during experiments.

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Testing coatings for corrosion protection

To shield steel from the corrosive threats posed by sea air, Sandia National Laboratories researchers tested a variety of nickel mixtures as protective coatings on stainless steel. The researchers found that the specific material applied, and the specific application process used, impacted the properties of the coating, including how protective it was against corrosion.

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MA-tek follows big clients as it expands

Materials Analysis Technology Inc., Taiwan, is setting up new laboratories in Kumamoto, Japan, and the US state of Arizona to support its “big clients,” and is eyeing more locations in the future amid the changing IC supply chain landscape.

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Electron-rich metals make ceramics tough to crack

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have discovered a way to make ceramics tougher and more resistant to cracking, by building them with a blend of metal atoms with more electrons in their outer shell, unlocking the potential to enable ceramics to handle higher levels of force and stress than before.

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Early analysis of NASA’s first asteroid-return sample

NASA officials recently unveiled a powdery material—from pieces of the asteroid Bennu—that looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds. The fragments were collected and returned to Earth for materials analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. Early evaluations using electron microscopy revealed high carbon content.

The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet. The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter.

And now those pristine materials sit in an airtight vessel in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta are getting their first chance to study the sample up close.

The electron microscopes were fired up and ready” by September 27, Lauretta said in a news conference. “And boy did we really nail it.” (Lauretta, the principal investigator, gave the mission its name, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.) The preliminary investigation of a tiny fraction of the sample revealed it is rich in water, carbon, and organic compounds.

Carbon is essential for all living things on Earth, forming chemical bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements necessary to build proteins and enzymes. “We’re looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played essential roles in the origin of life on Earth,” Lauretta said.

The Bennu sample contained about 4.7 percent carbon, as measured by the Carnegie Institution for Science, according to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This is “the highest abundance of carbon” the Carnegie team has measured in an extraterrestrial sample, Glavin said. “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

The Bennu sample is also flush with organic compounds, too, which glowed like tiny stars within the dark sample when exposed to a black light. “We picked the right asteroid—and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Asteroids like Bennu were most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet features—the water in oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably arrived when space rocks landed on our young planet some 4 billion years ago. Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which according to Lauretta, was the key material that ferried H2O to Earth.

Under magnification, the clay has a sinuous shape. “We call this serpentine because they look like serpents or snakes inside the sample, and they have water locked inside their crystal structure,” he said. “That is how we think water got to the Earth.”

This is only the start. The OSIRIS-REx science team, as they catalog the sample, have months of more detailed work ahead. After six months, they will publish the catalog; scientists from around the world will be able to propose studies using the materials—though more than half the sample will be kept in reserve for research to take place years or even decades in the future.

Image – A scanning electron microscope view of the minerals in the Bennu sample; Fig. A shows the snake-shaped clay that contains water. Courtesy of NASA livestream.

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For more information:

NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/

Graphene’s new metallic relative: Molybdenene

Graphene, and other similar two-dimensional materials, exhibit fascinating properties such as superconductivity, extraordinary strength, and exotic quantum phenomena. Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich, along with partners from the Indian Institute of Technology in Patna and the Australian University of Newcastle, have now created a special material of this kind that exhibits a metallic character. It consists of just one atomic layer of molybdenum atoms and is also referred to as “molybdenene.”

The scientists succeeded in producing a thin sheet of the metal molybdenum, which is just one atomic layer thick. The new material is thus similarly thin as graphene, probably the best-known 2D material. The latter consists of carbon and was first isolated in 2004. The discovery drew great attention because graphene conducts electricity and heat far better than copper and is a hundred times more stable than steel. At the same time, it is exceptionally light and flexible. Due to its special 2D structure, graphene also exhibits some unusual electromagnetic effects that could enable groundbreaking innovations in the field of quantum technology.

In recent years, other 2D materials such as phosphorene or germanene have been introduced. Like molybdenene, they exhibit some impressive properties, while the latter still differs from other 2D materials in some aspects. “Many 2D materials are sensitive to heat, but molybdenene is not. Moreover, this is the first metallic 2D material where free-standing layers could be prepared” explains Prof. Ilia Valov from the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-7) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

The researchers created the new 2D material using a microwave, in which they heated a mixture of molybdenum sulphide (MoS2) and graphene to incandescence at a temperature of around 3000°Celsius. In a reaction driven by the microwave electric field, finely branched hair structures called “whiskers” were formed. It is in the “whiskers” that the tapered molybdenum layers can be found.

In first tests, the scientists could already observe a variety of useful properties. “Molybdenene is mechanically extremely stable. It could be used, for example, as a coating for electrodes to make batteries even more powerful and robust,” explains Ilia Valov. The researchers expect that the material has further exotic electronic properties, similar to graphene, because of its special 2D structure. Due to its metallic character, it also has freely moving electrons. These accumulate on the two side sides of the molybdenene, which makes the material an interesting candidate for catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions.

In collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology in Patna and the Australian University of Newcastle, the researchers have already been able to develop a practical scientific application for molybdenene. Thanks to its stability and excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, it is ideally suited as a measuring tip for atomic force microscopy (AFM) and surface-enhanced RAMAN spectroscopy (SERS). Initial sample recordings show that molybdenene offers various advantages over established tip materials and, because of its thin, flat shape, is capable of providing particularly good protection against unwanted interference signals.

Image – Electron microscope images of the hair-shaped structures, known as “whiskers,” which contain thin molybdenene layers. Courtesy of Nature Nanotechnology.

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For more information:

Forschungszentrum Jülich

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en

Deep learning uses surface image to look inside

According to researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., engineers may now be able to figure out what’s going on inside a part—from an airplane wing to a medical implant—simply by observing properties of the material’s surface.

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Squeezing a diamond sandwich produces useful data

Scientists have searched, for decades, for a way to apply the exceptional analytical capabilities of neutrons to materials under pressures approaching those surrounding the Earth’s core. These extreme pressures can rearrange a material’s atoms, potentially resulting in interesting new properties.

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