The hardness of a material normally is set by the strength of chemical bonds between electrons of neighboring atoms, not by freely flowing conduction electrons. Now a team of scientists has shown that ...

(Nanowerk News) An Australian-led study uses a scanning-tunnelling microscope ‘trick’ to map electronic structure in Na3Bi, seeking an answer to that material’s extremely high electron mobility. To ...

(Nanowerk News) Using a spin-polarized metastable helium beam, a group headed by Dr. Shiro Entani, who is a limited-term researcher at the Advanced Science Research Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency ...

WHEN ultra-violet radiation is absorbed by atoms in a solid, one of two things may happen. Electrons may be freed from the parent atoms or impurity centres, in which case these electrons are able to ...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have shown, for the first time with very high time and spatial resolution, that electrons in ...

Modern high-density magnetic memories such as hard disk drives and magnetoresistive random access memories feature magnetic bits with a size of only a few magnetic grains (see, for example, ref. 1).

One of the great successes of 20th-century physics was the quantum mechanical description of solids. This allowed scientists to understand for the ...

The hardness of materials is determined by the strength of the chemical bonds that are formed between the electrons of the neighbouring atoms. For example, the bonds in diamond are very strong, so it ...