(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration)
Scientists from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Northwestern University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology have found evidence that silver nanoparticles embedded in packaging used as an antimicrobial agent were able to seep into the dry food the packaging is meant to protect. The scientists created samples of silver nanoparticles and embedded them in polyethylene film wraps, which could hold various types of food items. They tested wheat flour, slices of cheese, ground rice, and spinach leaves. They found that the nanoparticles had made their way to all the foods, though to varying degrees. They found, for example, that there was far more contamination of the cheese than there was of the spinach leaves.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
University of Missouri scientists are unlocking the secrets of halide perovskites – a material that might bring us closer to energy-efficient optoelectronics. The scientists are studying the material at the nanoscale. At this level, the material is astonishingly efficient at converting sunlight into energy. To optimize the material for electronic applications, the scientists used a method called ice lithography, known for its ability to fabricate materials at the nanometer scale. This ultra-cool method allowed the team to create distinct properties for the material using an electron beam.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Stanford University, Rice University, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have described how a type of quasiparticle, called a polaron, behaves in tellurene, a nanomaterial made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms. A polaron forms when charge-carrying particles such as electrons interact with vibrations in the atomic or molecular lattice of a material. The researchers had hypothesized that as tellurene transitions from bulk to nanometer thickness, polarons change from large, spread-out electron-vibration interactions to smaller, localized interactions. Computations and experimental measurements backed up this scenario.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Researchers from Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the University of Vienna in Austria, Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and Universita Degli Studi Dell’ Aquila in Italy have created a device that can generate photon pairs more efficiently than previous methods while being less prone to error. To create the device, the researchers used thin crystals of a van der Waals semiconducting transition metal called molybdenum disulfide. Then, they layered six of these crystal pieces into a stack, with each piece rotated 180 degrees relative to the crystal slabs above and below. As light travels through this stack, a phenomenon called quasi-phase-matching manipulates properties of the light, enabling the creation of paired photons. “We believe this breakthrough will establish van der Waals materials as the core of next-generation nonlinear and quantum photonic architectures,” said James Schuck, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Cambridge have unveiled the existence of an intriguing link between ferroelectric domain walls and electron interactions in a type of van der Waals 2D material. A domain wall is a boundary or interface separating regions inside a material that exhibit different orientations of ferroelectric polarization. The link discovered by the researchers gives rise to a new type of superconductivity that is unique to these 2D materials. “We showed that places like domain walls, typically associated with irregularities and potentially harmful for things like superconductivity, can indeed be helpful for superconductivity,” said Gaurav Chaudhary and Ivar Martin, the two authors of this study.