2023 New's Items

Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.

Now, a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they...

Imagine a strand of hair, how tiny and fragile it is. Now try to imagine something ten thousand times smaller, which carries electricity and data in the form of electrons zipping along its length. This is a graphene nanoribbon, a miniscule chain of carbon atoms. Because of their tiny dimensions, graphene nanoribbons have properties that larger carbon structures lack—electrons travel along them in unusual ways—and the potential to help build ultra-powerful and fast computers and sensors of the future.

Typically, researchers have created these nanoribbons by slicing and peeling small...

Excitons are drawing attention as possible quantum bits (qubits) in tomorrow’s quantum computers and are central to optoelectronics and energy-harvesting processes. However, these charge-neutral quasiparticles, which exist in semiconductors and other materials, are notoriously difficult to confine and manipulate. Now, for the first time, researchers have created and directly observed highly localized excitons confined in simple stacks of atomically thin materials. The work confirms theoretical predictions and opens new avenues for controlling excitons with custom-built materials.

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