Actualités

Buildings of the future may be lit by collections of glowing plants and designed around an infrastructure of sunlight harvesting, water transport, and soil collecting and composting systems. That’s the vision behind an interdisciplinary collaboration between an MIT architecture professor and a professor of chemical engineering.

Physicists at the University of Bath have developed a flexible process allowing the synthesis in a single flow of a wide range of novel nanomaterials with various morphologies, with potential applications in areas including optics and sensors.
The nanomaterials are formed from Tungsten Disulphide – a Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (TMD) – and can be grown on insulating planar substrates without requiring a catalyst. TMDs are layered materials, and in their two-dimensional form can be considered the inorganic analogues of graphene.

Researchers at Caltech have designed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by creating specific nanoscale patterning on the objects’ surfaces.

Though still theoretical, the work is a step toward developing a spacecraft that could reach the nearest planet outside of our solar system in 20 years, powered and accelerated only by light.

Scientists at Dongguk University have found a way to create printed p-channel thin-film transistors by using the abundantly available and environmentally-friendly copper(I) iodide semiconductor at room temperature. Their energy-efficient and cost-effective fabrication method for these transistors may pave the way for developing low-cost and novel optoelectronic devices.

Inorganic crystalline silicon solar cells account for more than 90% of the market despite a recent surge in research efforts to develop new architectures and materials such as organics and perovskites.

Inorganic crystalline silicon solar cells account for more than 90 percent of all installations worldwide despite a recent surge in research efforts to develop new materials (organics and perovskites) and solar cell architectures.

In recent years, black phosphorus (BP or phosphorene), a novel two-dimensional (2D) semiconducting material, has gained tremendous attention because of its intriguing properties, such as ON/OFF ratio, high carrier mobility, and tunable direct band.

Over the past ten years, paper has emerged as a focus area for researchers developing innovative techniques for printed basic electronics components. The goal of this research is to replace plastic substrates with low-cost, versatile and sustainable materials.