The National Science Foundation awarded a $661,462 Major Research Instrumentation grant to the University of Maine to upgrade a multiuser instrument in the Climate Change Institute.
Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, a Ph.D. student at EPFL School of Engineering’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERlab), made a chance discovery during his research on phase transitions in vanadium dioxide.
The Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, Nano Electronic Materials Branch, used heat flow experiments to manipulate quantum materials into functioning in new and different ways at higher temperatures.
In new experiments, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have emulated the conditions of Lonsdaleite, a diamond formation, using picosecond time scale laser compression and observed the transition with state-of -the-art materials characterization using femtosecond x-ray pulses. This graphite-diamond phase transition is of particular interest for fundamental reasons and a wide range of applications.
For decades, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has guided the design of new materials including nanoparticles, with his textbook process known as “Ostwald ripening.” According to his theory, small particles dissolve and redeposit onto the surface of large particles, and the large particles continue to grow until all of the small particles have dissolved. But now, new video footage captured by Berkeley Lab scientists reveals for the first time that nanoparticle growth is directed not by difference in size, but by defects. The scientists recently reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.
