Items Tagged With Materials Science

An international team of scientists has used a novel technique to measure, for the first time, the precise conditions at which certain ultrathin materials spontaneously become electrically polarised. The research provides the fundamental scientific basis for understanding this “ferroelectric” state in materials needed for next-generation “smart card” memory chips and other devices. The research is published in a recent issue of the journal Science.

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have taken a step toward simplifying the creation of nanostructures by identifying the first inorganic material to phase separate with near-perfect order at the nanometer scale. The finding provides an atomically tuneable nanocomposite “workbench” that is cheap and easy to produce and provides a super-lattice foundation potentially suitable for building nanostructures. The findings appear in the August issue of Nature Materials.

Bulletproof jackets do not turn security guards, police officers and armed forces into Robocops, repelling the force of bullets in their stride. New research in carbon nanotechnology however could give those in the line of fire materials which can bounce bullets without a trace of damage.