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Researchers have developed a new two-photon polymerization technique that uses two lasers to 3D print complex high-resolution structures. The advance could make this 3D printing process less expensive, helping it find wider use in a variety of applications.

Two-photon polymerization is an advanced additive manufacturing technique that traditionally uses femtosecond lasers to polymerize materials in a precise, 3D manner. Although this process works well for making high-resolution microstructures, it isn’t widely used in manufacturing because femtosecond lasers are expensive and increase the cost of printing parts.

“We combined a relatively low-cost laser emitting visible light with a femtosecond laser emitting infrared pulses to reduce the power requirement of the femtosecond laser,” said research team leader Xianfan Xu from Purdue University. “In this way, with a given femtosecond laser power, the printing throughput can be increased, leading to a lower cost for printing individual parts.”

We study the possibility that the vacuum energydensity of scalar and internal-space gauge fieldsarising from the process of dimensional reduction ofhigher dimensional gravity theories plays the role of quintessence. We show that, for themultidimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills system compactifiedon a R × S3 × Sdtopology, there are classically stable solutions suchthat the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe atpresent can be accounted for without upsetting structureformation scenarios or violating observational bounds onthe vacuum energy density.

Power plants, factories, car engines—everything that consumes energy produces heat, much of which is wasted. Thermoelectric devices could capture this wasted heat and convert it into electricity, but their production has been prohibitively costly and complex.

Yanliang Zhang, the Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and colleagues from a multi-institutional team have devised an ink-based manufacturing method making feasible the large-scale and cost-effective manufacturing of highly efficient thermoelectric devices.

Their finding were recently published in Energy & Environmental Science.

Bioengineers demonstrated that an ATP biosensor can be used to reveal microbial energetic dynamics and facilitate bioproduction.

The ATLAS Experiment at CERN has made two years’ worth of scientific data available to the public for research purposes. The data include recordings of proton–proton collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a collision energy of 13 TeV.

This is the first time that ATLAS has released data on this scale, and it marks a significant milestone in terms of public access and utilization of LHC data.

Continue reading “CERN’s ATLAS experiment releases 65 TB of open data for research” »

MIT physicists have developed a new form of graphene, creating a five-lane electron superhighway that allows for ultra-efficient electron movement without energy loss.

This breakthrough in rhombohedral pentalayer graphene could transform low-power electronic devices and operates via the quantum anomalous Hall effect at zero magnetic field.

MIT physicists and their collaborators have created a five-lane superhighway for electrons that could allow ultra-efficient electronics and more.

New research identifies semiconducting MAX phases with low thermal conductivity and high thermoelectric efficiency, potentially advancing high-temperature energy harvesting technology.

What if we tapped into billions of years of evolution to harness a greener future?

“People are always searching for chiral ground states,” McQueeney said. “The reason we use the concept of quasiparticle here is because it is a way of transmitting energy or information, like an electron is a quasiparticle, and we can send it from point A to point B, carrying some information.

A chiral quasiparticle would have other attributes to it. It would have a handedness, for example, and so you could think about novel ways to, say, transmit information from point A to point B, which didn’t involve moving a charge, but moving some chiral signal.

Discovering this new chiral excitation was especially exciting for McQueeney, You don’t expect it to be there, he said. And we still don’t understand why it’s there. As a matter of fact, we’re setting up other experiments to look for it in other materials.