Applied Physics

Window Into A Working Lithium-Ion Battery

Using a neutron beam, researchers at The Ohio State University have able to track the flow of lithium atoms into and out of an electrode in real time as a battery charged and discharged, providing a kind of window into the inner workings of a lithium-ion ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2014 - 10:29am

Go With The Co-Flow To Stabilize Chaotic 'Whipping' In Microfluidic Jets

When researchers created a whipped jet in polydimethylsiloxane oil, a viscous dielectric material, they were surprised to see the chaotic motion switch over to a steady-state helical structure. So they got a high-speed, microscope-based video camera opera ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2014 - 10:01am

Meet Graphene's Sexy New Cousin Germanene

The 2-D material germanene, a 'cousin of graphene', is made up of just a single layer of germanium atoms and is expected to exhibit impressive electrical and optical properties. Germanene was first proposed in 2009 but remained elusive. Since th ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 10 2014 - 7:30am

Captured: The Sound Of An Atom

Researchers have used sound to communicate with an artificial atom, demonstrating phenomena in quantum physics using sound rather than light. The interaction between atoms and light has been studied extensively but making acoustic waves couple to an artif ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 11 2014 - 5:30pm

Sound Vibrations To Reduce Pesticides And Boost Harvests?

Can sound vibrations replace pesticides? Researchers are adapting different eco-friendly methods to try and boost harvests and open up a new chapter in sustainable farming. Scientists in Northern Italy are experimenting with what they call eco-friendly sou ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 18 2014 - 8:00am

Snap Circuits Science: Resistors In Series

A tone generator is a useful piece of test equipment used, for example, to test the frequency range of audio equipment such as your stereo or the external speakers for your iPod. A tone generator can also be used to tune a musical instrument such as a gui ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Sep 18 2014 - 8:06am

Phase-Change Materials Set New Speed Limit For Silicon

As has been predicted for some time, there is a physics train wreck coming at the semiconductor industry- a size and speed where atoms have reached their limits. Quantum computing has remained a dream for 20 years with little progress, which means chips w ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 20 2014 - 10:04am

Robotics: 555 Timer H-Bridge

You can build a simple circuit using two 555 Timer ICs to create an H-bridge that will drive a single motor in forward or reverse. An H-bridge circuit is often used in robotics to reverse the polarity of a motor. For example, if the motor is spinning in th ...

Article - Steve Schuler - Apr 6 2015 - 7:09am

Spin-Based Computing: Single Material Is Both Semiconductor And Magnetic

Electricity and magnetism rule our digital world but they are really 19th century advancements still being optimized in the 21st. In our current scheme, semiconductors process electrical information while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage b ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 28 2014 - 11:00am

Physics Nobel Prize Awarded For Blue LEDs

Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura have been award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Using blue LEDs, white lig ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 7 2014 - 10:38am