Highlights

At low temperatures, the electrons in most layered transition-metal chalcogenides undergo a phase transition into an interesting, highly-ordered state called the charge-density-wave (CDW), in which the electron density spontaneously acquires a weak, periodic spatial modulation. In a small subset of materials, the CDW state is destroyed and replaced by the superconducting state. The recent discovery […]

Superconductivity, the ability to carry electrical current without resistance, would revolutionize power transmission if the property appeared in a material at close to room temperature. Two decades ago a class of materials, the copper oxides, were discovered to show superconductivity at temperatures up to 140 degrees below room temperature . The mechanism of superconductivity and […]

Superconductors can carry a large amount of electrical current without producing any wasteful heat. Today, they are used to produce the magnetic field in medical resonance imaging (MRI) units; in the future, superconductors may help to stabilize the national power grid while reducing waste in transmission, and they may also lead to improved ship propulsion. […]

The increased speed and power of microelectronic devices has come from a steady reduction in the size of their constituent features, which has been achieved by using progressively shorter wavelengths for the photolithography used in their fabrication. Today, the most advanced production photolithography uses 193 nm ultraviolet (UV) light from an ArF excimer laser. At […]

A soft cantilever beam, which can detect a very weak force, has been used by IRG1 researchers to uncover a striking property of cuprate superconductors: that trace supercurrents surrounding magnetic flux vortices persist for tens of degrees above the superconducting transition temperature Tc. The field needed to unbind these paired electrons is […]

Princeton scientists have developed a new method for making gratings by prying apart two rigid plates that sandwich a thin, glassy polymeric film. The process fractures the film into complementary sets of ridges on each plate, with highly uniform ridge spacings ranging from 200 nm to 200 µm, scaling directly with the film thickness.

A team of Princeton researchers has developed an enabling technique for manufacturing electro-optical devices from organic semiconductors. The method relies on a modeling framework to describe different material transfer modes that occur when the organic materials are “stamped” onto an already patterned substrate, which allowed the Princeton team to cleanly transfer an organic thin film […]