2023 New's Items

New ‘chain mail’ material of interlocking molecules is tough, flexible and easy to make

January 23, 2023
Robert Sanders |College of Chemistry

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have created a new type of material from millions of identical, interlocking molecules that for the first time allows the synthesis of extensive 2D or 3D structures that are flexible, strong and resilient, like the chain mail that protected medieval knights.

The material, called an infinite catenane, can be synthesized in a single chemical step.

French chemist Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for synthesizing the first catenane — two linked rings. These structures served as the foundation for making...

https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/new-%E2%80%98chain-mail%E2%80%99-material-in…

Building the Materials for Next-Gen Tech

February 13, 2023
Sarah C.P. Williams | College of Chemistry

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...

https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/building-materials-next-gen-tech

New Compound That Withstands Extreme Heat and Electricity Could Lead to Next-Generation Energy Storage Devices

February 15, 2023
Rachel Berkowitz | Berkeley Lab

Society’s growing demand for high-voltage electrical technologies – including pulsed power systems, cars and electrified aircraft, and renewable energy applications – requires a new generation of capacitors that store and deliver large amounts of energy under intense thermal and electrical conditions. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Scripps Research have now developed a new polymer-based device that efficiently handles record amounts of energy while withstanding extreme temperatures and electric fields. The device is...

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/15/new-compound-could-lead-to-next-generation…

Microscopy Images Could Lead to New Ways to Control Excitons for Quantum Computing

February 7, 2023
Alison Hatt | Berkeley Lab

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.

“...

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/02/07/microscopy-excitons-quantum-computing/?utm…

Kristin Persson Elected into the 2022 Class of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

January 31, 2023
Valeria Sabate | AAAS

Washington, D.C. — The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected 505 scientists, engineers and innovators from around the world and across all disciplines to the 2022 class of AAAS Fellows, one of the most distinguished honors within the scientific community. The newly elected Fellows are being recognized for their scientific and socially notable achievements spanning their careers....

https://www.aaas.org/news/elected-fellows-announcement-2022?utm_medium=email&utm…

Electronic Bridge Allows Rapid Energy Sharing Between Semiconductors

January 4, 2023
Alison Hatt | Berkeley Lab

As semiconductor devices become ever smaller, researchers are exploring two-dimensional (2D) materials for potential applications in transistors and optoelectronics. Controlling the flow of electricity and heat through these materials is key to their functionality, but first we need to understand the details of those behaviors at atomic scales.

Now, researchers have discovered that electrons play a surprising role in how energy is transferred between layers of 2D semiconductor materials tungsten diselenide (WSe2) and tungsten disulfide (WS2). Although the...

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2023/01/04/electronic-bridge-semiconductor-energy-sha…