2020 New's Items

Employing liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs) to transport hydrogen to where it can be utilized relies on methods of efficient chemical dehydrogenation to access this fuel. Therefore, developing effective strategies to optimize the catalytic performance of cheap transition metal-based catalysts in terms of activity and stability for dehydrogenation of LOHCs is a critical challenge. Here, we report the design and synthesis of ultrasmall nickel nanoclusters (∼1.5 nm) deposited on defect-rich boron nitride (BN) nanosheet (Ni/BN) catalysts with higher methanol dehydrogenation...

Acoustic communication is crucial in underwater exploration, where sound is the dominant information carrier, with significantly less loss and scattering than that of electromagnetic waves. However, the capacity of acoustic communication channels is limited due to the intrinsically low speed of sound relative to that of electromagnetic waves and because the attenuation of acoustic waves underwater increases with frequency. Recently, orbital angular momentum (OAM) has emerged as an alternative multiplexing degree of freedom to encode data onto vortex beams for increasing the capacity...

Unidirectional wave propagation can introduce strong direction-dependent energy responses, and thus, greatly benefits the construction of switching and logic devices. Such an effect has drawn much attention in acoustics, but has not been able to practically address the essential issue of insufficient transmission efficiency in the forward direction. Here, we present a one-way structure that experimentally realizes near-total forward acoustic wave transportation, while still maintaining a broadband high contrast ratio and single-mode property. The experimentally observed rectification...

Ten years ago, three teams experimentally demonstrated the first spasers, or plasmonic nanolasers, after the spaser concept was first proposed theoretically in 2003. An overview of the significant progress achieved over the last 10 years is presented here, together with the original context of and motivations for this research. After a general introduction, we first summarize the fundamental properties of spasers and discuss the major motivations that led to the first demonstrations of spasers and nanolasers. This is followed by an overview of crucial technological progress,...