Electronics, computing, and information technology

Materials scientists at Rice University are shedding light on the intricate growth processes of 2D crystals, paving the way for controlled synthesis of these materials with unprecedented precision. The researchers have developed a custom-built miniaturized chemical vapor deposition system to observe and record the growth of 2D molybdenum disulfide crystals in real time.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and colleagues from the Joint Quantum Institute, a research partnership between NIST and the University of Maryland, have developed standards and calibrations for optical microscopes that allow quantum dots to be aligned with the center of a photonic component to within an error of 10 to 20 nanometers. Such alignment is critical for chip-scale devices that employ the radiation emitted by quantum dots to store and transmit quantum information.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new fabrication process for helical metal nanoparticles that provides a simpler, cheaper way to rapidly produce a material essential for biomedical and optical devices. "One of our motivators is to drastically simplify manufacturing of complex materials that represent bottlenecks in many current technologies," said Nicholas Kotov, one of the scientists involved in this study. 

Researchers from Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have grown a twisted multilayer crystal structure for the first time and measured the structure's key properties. The researchers added a layer of gold between two sheets of a traditional semiconducting material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). "With only a bottom MoS2 layer, the gold is happy to align with it, so no twist happens," said Yi Cui, one of the scientists involved in the study.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Columbia University, and Stony Brook University have developed a universal method for producing a wide variety of designed metallic and semiconductor 3D nanostructures. “[B]y building on previous achievements, we have developed a method for converting these DNA-based structures into many types of functional inorganic 3D nano-architectures, and this opens tremendous opportunities for 3D nanoscale manufacturing," said Oleg Gang, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have used a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy and computational modeling to get a closer look and deeper understanding of tantalum oxide. When this amorphous oxide layer forms on the surface of tantalum – a superconductor that shows great promise for making the "qubit" building blocks of a quantum computer – it can impede the material's ability to retain quantum information.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that adding a thin layer of magnesium improves the properties of tantalum, a superconducting material that shows great promise for building qubits, the basis of quantum computers. The thin layer of magnesium keeps tantalum from oxidizing, improves its purity, and raises the temperature at which it operates as a superconductor. All three properties may increase tantalum's ability to hold onto quantum information in qubits.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have pioneered a groundbreaking approach toward understanding the behavior of an electric charge in microelectronics and nanoscale material systems. The novel approach enables visualizing charge motion at the nanometer level but at speeds thousands of times faster than conventional methods. The rapid, thorough view of processes demonstrated in the new approach was previously unattainable.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing nanometer-scale light-based systems that could deliver breakthroughs for ultrafast microelectronics and night vision capabilities. The scientists have designed and fabricated asymmetric, nano-sized gold structures on an atomically thin layer of graphene. The gold structures, called nanoantennas, capture and focus light waves, forming optical "hot spots" that excite the electrons within the graphene.