Creating two-dimensional materials large enough to use in electronics is a challenge despite huge effort but now, Penn State researchers have discovered a method for improving the quality of one class of 2D materials, with potential to achieve wafer-scale growth in the future.
"Frustration" plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable "supercrystal" created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.
Over the past 34 years, rainfall in Uganda has decreased by about 12 percent even though many of the global climate models predict an increase in rainfall for the area, according to an international team of researchers. Rainfall levels in Uganda impact agriculture, food security, wildlife habitats and regional economics as well as the prevalence of certain diseases.
Implanting a shunt or endoscopically reducing intracranial pressure and reducing fluid production are equally effective in treating infants with hydrocephalus caused by brain infections, according to an international team of researchers, but endoscopy may have fewer down-the-line complications.
Three Penn State faculty receive National Science Foundation Convergence awards as part of the Growing Convergent Research at NSF portfolio. The program seeks to highlight the deep integration of multiple disciplines in order to advance scientific discovery and innovation.
The "clean-energy economy" always seems a few steps away but never quite here. Fossil fuels still power transportation, heating and cooling, and manufacturing, but a team of scientists from Penn State and Florida State University have come one step closer to inexpensive, clean hydrogen fuel with a lower cost and industrially scalable catalyst that produces pure hydrogen through a low-energy water-splitting process.
Thinning a material down to a single-atom thickness can dramatically change that material's physical properties. For example, graphene, the best-known 2D material, has unparalleled strength and electrical conductivity, unlike its bulk form, graphite. Researchers have begun to study hundreds of other 2D materials for the purposes of electronics, sensing, early cancer diagnosis, water desalination and a host of other applications. Now, a team of Penn State researchers in the Department of Physics and the Center for Two-Dimensional and Layered Materials (2DLM) has developed a fast, nondestructive optical method for analyzing defects in 2D materials.
An unparalleled image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is giving an international team of astronomers the best look yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang. This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, collected with about 7 million seconds, or 11 and a half weeks, of Chandra observing time.
Kin Fai Mak, assistant professor of physics, has been awarded a 2016 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Five Penn state faculty members have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the organization announced.
An interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers has received federal funding to test whether a nanotechnology device can be used to trap and concentrate plant viruses, with an eye toward providing early detection that could help protect crops from disease and reduce pesticide use.
By creating atomic chains in a two-dimensional crystal, researchers at Penn State believe they have found a way to control the direction of materials properties in two- and three-dimensional crystals with implications in sensing, optoelectronics and next-generation electronics applications.
Four Penn State researchers have been awarded a total of $450,000 by the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation to carry out basic science research over the next two years.
A device made of bilayer graphene, an atomically thin hexagonal arrangement of carbon atoms, provides experimental proof of the ability to control the momentum of electrons and offers a path to electronics that could require less energy and give off less heat than standard silicon-based transistors. It is one step forward in a new field of physics called valleytronics.
Chad Hanna, assistant professor of physics at Penn State, has been honored with the inaugural Norman and Trygve Freed Early Career Professorship in Physics. Hanna is a gravitational-wave astrophysicist. His research with the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) focuses on detecting gravitational waves emitted by binary neutron stars or black holes. Gravitational waves, first detected by LIGO in 2015, are "ripples" in spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.
