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Category: energy – Page 12

Japanese scientists’ approach can enable cheap hydrogen fuel production

Scientists have demonstrated that a surface reconstruction strategy can enable affordable hydrogen fuel production. The hydrogen fuel is created using The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). However, scaling this process from a lab experiment to large-scale commercial production has been challenging.

Now, scientists in Japan have showcased that a surface reconstruction pathway can produce durable, non-noble metal-based cathodes that speed up the HER reaction.

Researchers highlighted that they can maintain their performance for more than 300 hours and are calculated to cost very close to the US Department of Energy’s 2026 H2 production target ($2.00 per kgH2-1).

Sun’s explosions echo in Earth’s skies: How the atmosphere synchronizes with solar flare pulsations

Earth’s atmosphere is much more sensitive to ripples of radiation from the sun than scientists previously believed, new research by Queen’s University Belfast has found.

Solar flares, which are sudden and intense bursts of energy from the sun’s magnetic field, happen regularly.

Understanding how they impact the Earth’s atmosphere is important as very powerful flares can cause inaccuracies in GPS systems and, in extreme cases, can cause total radio blackouts, where all signal is lost.

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The first experimental observation of Dirac exceptional points

Exceptional points (EPs) are unique types of energy-level degeneracies that occur in non-Hermitian systems. Since their existence was first proposed more than a century ago, physicists have only been able to experimentally observe two types of EPs, both of which were found to give rise to exotic phases of matter in various materials, including Dirac and Weyl semimetals.

Building on recent theoretical studies, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China recently set out to experimentally observe a new class of EPs, known as Dirac EPs. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could open new exciting possibilities for the study of non-Hermitian dynamics and for the development of protocols to reliably control .

“Our inspiration stemmed from a prior theoretical study that proposed a type of exceptional point (EP) termed Dirac EPs,” Xing Rong, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. “We realized that this novel type of EP is distinct from all experimentally observed EPs over the past half-century. Our work aimed to transform this theoretical prediction into experimental reality.”

New framework suggests stars dissolve into neutrons to forge heavy elements

Understanding the origin of heavy elements on the periodic table is one of the most challenging open problems in all of physics. In the search for conditions suitable for these elements via “nucleosynthesis,” a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team is going where no researchers have gone before: the gamma-ray burst jet and surrounding cocoon emerging from collapsed stars.

As proposed in an article in The Astrophysical Journal, photons produced deep in the jet could dissolve the outer layers of a star into neutrons, causing a series of physical processes that result in the formation of heavy elements.

“The creation of heavy elements such as uranium and plutonium necessitates extreme conditions,” said Matthew Mumpower, physicist at Los Alamos. “There are only a few viable yet rare scenarios in the cosmos where these elements can form, and all such locations need a copious amount of neutrons. We propose a new phenomenon where those neutrons don’t pre-exist but are produced dynamically in the star.”

Semiconductor nanowires capture diffuse sunlight to split water and store energy as hydrogen

A U of A engineering researcher is using sunlight and semiconductor catalysts to produce hydrogen by splitting apart water molecules into their constituent elements.

“The process to form the semiconductor, called thermal condensation polymerization, uses cheap and Earth-abundant materials, and could eventually lead to a more efficient, economical path to clean energy than existing ,” says project lead Karthik Shankar of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, an expert in the field of photocatalysis.

In a collaboration between the U of A and the Technical University of Munich, results of the research were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.