Hoverskating

Why superconductor research is in a ‘golden age’ — despite controversy Last week’s retraction dealt a blow to the search for room-temperature superconductivity, but physicists are optimistic about the field’s future.

We need a better way to map Earth's magnetic field. Finding it could win 1 of these teams $2 million The magnetic shifts can affect navigation systems used by airplanes, ships and even your mobile phone.

The room-temperature superconductor that wasn’t We have good explanations for why a chemical called LK-99 behaved the way it did.

Scientists trap light inside a magnet A new study led by Vinod M. Menon and his group at the City College of New York shows that trapping light inside magnetic materials may dramatically enhance their intrinsic properties. Strong optical responses of magnets are important for the development of magnetic lasers and magneto-optical memory...

Researchers use ribbons of graphene to push the material's potential Think you know everything about a material? Try giving it a twist—literally. That's the main idea of an emerging field in condensed matter physics called "twistronics," which has researchers drastically changing the properties of 2D materials, like graphene, with subtle changes—as small as going...

Towards a sustainable superconductor technology with magnesium diboride super magnets Magnesium diboride (MgB2) is a low-cost, non-toxic superconductor used in field magnets, electric motors, and generators. However, producing nanoscale boron (B) particles to fabricate MgB2 is expensive. Researchers recently tackled this issue by using high-energy ultra-sonication in 2-propanol, a hi...

3D-printed alloy 600 times as resistant to stress as existing alloys A team of materials scientists from NASA working with a colleague from The Ohio State University and another from HX5 LLC has developed a 3D printing process that produces an alloy that is much more resistant to stress than others now in use. Their study is reported in Nature.

Magnetic imaging unlocks crucial property of 2D superconductor Using state-of-the-art magnetic imaging, a Cornell-led collaboration has for the first time characterized a key property of the superconducting state of a class of atomically thin materials that are too difficult to measure due to their minuscule size.

Thinnest-ever freestanding film with ferroelectric properties Researchers at the Institute for Future Materials and Systems at Nagoya University in Japan have successfully synthesized barium titanate (BaTiO3) nanosheets with a thickness of 1.8 nanometers, the thinnest thickness ever created for a free-standing film. Given that thickness is related to functiona...