A condition long considered to be unfavorable to electrical conduction in semiconductor materials may actually be beneficial in 2D semiconductors, according to new findings by UC Santa Barbara researchers published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Electron-phonon interactions—collisions between charge-carrying electrons and heat-carrying vibrations in the atomic lattice of the material—are considered the primary cause of electrons slowing down as they travel through semiconductor material. But according to UCSB mechanical engineers Bolin Liao and Yujie Quan, when electrons and phonons are considered as a single system, these interactions in atomically thin material prove to actually conserve total momentum and energy, and could have important implications for 2D semiconductor design.

“This is in sharp contrast to three-dimensional systems where you have a lot of momentum loss processes,” said Liao, who specializes in thermal and energy science.

The candidate pool for engineered materials that can help enable tomorrow’s cutting-edge optical technologies—such as lasers, detectors and imaging devices—is much deeper than previously believed.

That’s according to new research from the University of Michigan that examined a class of materials known as topological insulators. These materials have exciting and tunable properties when it comes to how they transmit energy and information.

“We see this as a step toward building a more versatile and powerful foundation for future photonic technologies,” said Xin Xie, a research fellow in the U-M Department of Physics and lead author of the recent study in the journal Physical Review X.

Developing next-generation energy storage technologies that can deliver both high power and high capacity at the same time. A research team led by Dr. Bon-Cheol Ku and Dr. Seo Gyun Kim from the Carbon Composite Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), alo