PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Little swirling mysteries: Uncovering dynamics of ultrasmall, ultrafast groups of atoms

Little swirling mysteries: Uncovering dynamics of ultrasmall, ultrafast groups of atoms
2021-04-14
(Press-News.org) Our high-speed, high-bandwidth world constantly requires new ways to process and store information. Semiconductors and magnetic materials have made up the bulk of data storage devices for decades. In recent years, however, researchers and engineers have turned to ferroelectric materials, a type of crystal that can be manipulated with electricity.

In 2016, the study of ferroelectrics got more interesting with the discovery of polar vortices -- essentially spiral-shaped groupings of atoms -- within the structure of the material. Now a team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has uncovered new insights into the behavior of these vortices, insights that may be the first step toward using them for fast, versatile data processing and storage.

"You don't want something that does what a transistor does, because we have transistors already. So you look for new phenomena. What aspects can they bring? We look for objects with faster speed. This is what inspires people. How can we do something different?" -- John Freeland, senior physicist, Argonne National Laboratory

What is so important about the behavior of groups of atoms in these materials? For one thing, these polar vortices are intriguing new discoveries, even when they are just sitting still. For another, this new research, published as a cover story in Nature, reveals how they move. This new type of spiral-patterned atomic motion can be coaxed into occurring, and can be manipulated. That's good news for this material's potential use in future data processing and storage devices.

"Although the motion of individual atoms alone may not be too exciting, these motions join together to create something new -- an example of what scientists refer to as emergent phenomena -- which may host capabilities we could not imagine before," said Haidan Wen, a physicist in Argonne's X-ray Science Division (XSD).

These vortices are indeed small -- about five or six nanometers wide, thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair, or about twice as wide as a single strand of DNA. Their dynamics, however, cannot be seen in a typical laboratory environment. They need to be excited into action by applying an ultrafast electric field.

All of which makes them difficult to observe and to characterize. Wen and his colleague, John Freeland, a senior physicist in Argonne's XSD, have spent years studying these vortices, first with the ultrabright X-rays of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne, and most recently with the free-electron laser capabilities of the LINAC Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Both the APS and LCLS are DOE Office of Science User Facilities.

Using the APS, researchers were able to use lasers to create a new state of matter and obtain a comprehensive picture of its structure using X-ray diffraction. In 2019, the team, led jointly by Argonne and The Pennsylvania State University, reported their findings in a Nature Materials cover story, most notably that the vortices can be manipulated with light pulses. Data was taken at several APS beamlines: 7-ID-C, 11-ID-D, 33-BM and 33-ID-C.

"Although this new state of matter, a so called supercrystal, does not exist naturally, it can be created by illuminating carefully engineered thin layers of two distinct materials using light," said Venkatraman Gopalan, professor of materials science and engineering and physics at Penn State.

"A lot of work went into measuring the motion of a tiny object," Freeland said. "The question was, how do we see these phenomena with X-rays? We could see that there was something interesting with the system, something we might be able to characterize with ultrafast timescale probes."

The APS was able to take snapshots of these vortices at nanosecond time scales -- a hundred million times faster than it takes to blink your eyes -- but the research team discovered this was not fast enough.

"We knew something exciting must be happening that we couldn't detect," Wen said. "The APS experiments helped us pinpoint where we want to measure, at faster time scales that we were not able to access at the APS. But LCLS, our sister facility at SLAC, provides the exact tools needed to solve this puzzle." 

With their prior research in hand, Wen and Freeland joined colleagues from SLAC and DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) -- Gopalan and Long-Qing Chen of Pennsylvania State University; Jirka Hlinka, head of the Department of Dielectrics at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Paul Evans of the University of Wisconsin, Madison; and their teams -- to design a new experiment that would be able to tell them how these atoms behave, and whether that behavior could be controlled. Using what they learned at APS, the team -- including the lead authors of the new paper, Qian Li and Vladimir Stoica, both post-doctoral researchers at the APS at the time of this work -- pursued further investigations at the LCLS at SLAC.

"LCLS uses X-ray beams to take snapshots of what atoms are doing at timescales not accessible to conventional X-ray apparatus," said Aaron Lindenberg, associate professor of materials science and engineering and photon sciences at Stanford University and SLAC. "X-ray scattering can map out structures, but it takes a machine like LCLS to see where the atoms are and to track how they are dynamically moving at unimaginably fast speeds."

Using a new ferroelectric material designed by Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Lane Martin at Berkeley Lab, the team was able to excite a group of atoms into swirling motion by an electric field at terahertz frequencies, the frequency that's roughly 1,000 times faster than the processor in your cell phone. They were able to then capture images of those spins at femtosecond timescales. A femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second -- it's such a short period of time that light can only travel about the length of a small bacteria before it's over.

With this level of precision, the research team saw a new type of motion they had not seen before.

"Despite theorists having been interested in this type of motion, the exact dynamical properties of polar vortices remained nebulous until the completion of this experiment," Hlinka said. "The experimental findings helped theorists to refine the model, providing a microscopic insight in the experimental observations. It was a real adventure to reveal this sort of concerted atomic dance."

This discovery opens up a new set of questions that will take further experiments to answer, and planned upgrades of both the APS and LCLS light sources will help push this research further. LCLS-II, now under construction, will increase its X-ray pulses from 120 to 1 million per second, enabling scientists to look at the dynamics of materials with unprecedented accuracy.

And the APS Upgrade, which will replace the current electron storage ring with a state-of-the-art model that will increase the brightness of the coherent X-rays up to 500 times, will enable researchers to image small objects like these vortices with nanometer resolution. 

Researchers can already see the possible applications of this knowledge. The fact that these materials can be tuned by applying small changes opens up a wide range of possibilities, Lindenberg said.

"From a fundamental perspective we are seeing a new type of matter," he said. "From a technological perspective of information storage, we want to take advantage of what is happening at these frequencies for high-speed, high-bandwidth storage technology. I am excited about controlling the properties of this material, and this experiment shows possible ways of doing this in a dynamical sense, faster than we thought possible."

Wen and Freeland agreed, noting that these materials may have applications that no one has thought of yet.

"You don't want something that does what a transistor does, because we have transistors already," Freeland said. "So you look for new phenomena. What aspects can they bring? We look for objects with faster speed. This is what inspires people. How can we do something different?"

INFORMATION:

About the Advanced Photon Source

The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science's Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world's most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation's economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.

This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Little swirling mysteries: Uncovering dynamics of ultrasmall, ultrafast groups of atoms

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Seasonal water cycle fluctuations may trigger earthquakes in Taiwan

2021-04-14
A new study has identified a strong correlation between changes in Taiwan's seismicity rate and its seasonal water cycle fluctuations, suggesting that many faults in this region are so stressed that even minor shifts in strain caused by changes in groundwater storage can trigger earthquakes. Ya-Ju Hsu and colleagues observed that western Taiwan's seismicity rate reaches its highest levels between February and April, when the crust rebounds as stress from the groundwater load decreases, and its seismicity reaches its lowest levels between July and September, at the tail end of monsoon season. However, the researchers ...

COVID-19 in combination with hemorrhagic stroke doubles death risk

2021-04-14
COVID-19 and hemorrhagic stroke are a deadly combination, increasing the risk of death up to 2.4 times among patients who have this pairing compared to those who only had hemorrhagic strokes, according to a nationwide study led by University of Utah Health scientists. Patients who survived had longer hospital stays, more medical complications, and less favorable outcomes than those who did not have both conditions. Racial and ethnic minorities and those who were obese or had diabetes were among the most vulnerable. "This is one of the first studies to document that, in patients with hemorrhagic stroke who have comorbid COVID-19, there is a significantly elevated risk of in-hospital death," says Adam de Havenon, M.D., senior author of the study and an assistant professor of neurology ...

Reliably measuring whether rivers or lakes run out of air

Reliably measuring whether rivers or lakes run out of air
2021-04-14
When wastewater from villages and cities flows into rivers and lakes, large quantities of fats, proteins, sugars and other carbon-containing, organic substances wind up in nature together with the fecal matter. These organic substances are broken down by bacteria that consume oxygen. The larger the volume of wastewater, the better the bacteria thrive. This, however, means the oxygen content of the water continues to decrease until finally the fish, muscles or worms literally run out of air. This has created low-oxygen death zones in many rivers and lakes around the world. No gold standard for measurements until now In order to measure how heavily the waters are polluted with organic matter from feces, government ...

Grave goods show gendered roles for Neolithic farmers

2021-04-14
Grave goods, such as stone tools, have revealed that Neolithic farmers had different work-related activities for men and women. Researchers at the University of York analysed 400 stone objects found in graves at cemetery sites across Europe and noted there were differences in size, weight, and raw material dependent on whether the body was a male or a female. Archaeologists had previously thought that polished stone tools in this period were used for woodworking, but analysis now shows a much wider range of tasks, with different activities for men and women. The tools found in female graves were most likely used for the working of animal skins and hide, and tools for the men were associated with hunting ...

Researchers establish intracellular interaction network in breast cancer

Researchers establish intracellular interaction network in breast cancer
2021-04-14
Researchers at HSE University have identified the genes that play a crucial role in breast cancer metastasis. The results of the study were published in the journal PLOS ONE. Every human cell includes a huge number of various molecules: DNA, RNA, proteins, etc. One of the essential classes of molecules that interact with each other are microRNAs, along with their target genes and transcription factors. MicroRNAs are small molecules, which can directly reduce the concentration (expression) of target genes, while transcription factors are able to both increase and reduce the expression of ...

Lower COVID-19 rates seen in US states with higher adherence to mask wearing

2021-04-14
A new state-by-state analysis shows a statistical association between high adherence to mask wearing and reduced rates of COVID-19 in the U.S. Charlie Fischer and colleagues at the Boston University School of Public Health in Massachusetts present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 14. During the COVID-19 pandemic, different states have enacted different policies on mask wearing, with some states having no mask requirements and others requiring masks in all public spaces. Understanding the link between mask wearing and COVID-19 rates could help inform policies to mitigate stress on healthcare systems, economic instability, and death. To help clarify the effects of mask wearing, Fischer and colleagues examined publicly ...

Triple combination therapy shows promise against a rare deadly asbestos cancer

Triple combination therapy shows promise against a rare deadly asbestos cancer
2021-04-14
Combining immune-boosting drugs with radiation and surgery increased the survival and anticancer immune response in mouse models of mesothelioma in preclinical research by Princess Margaret Cancer Centre researchers. In a series of exciting experiments using mouse models of mesothelioma cancer, researchers found that combining two immunotherapy drugs can amplify the anti-tumour response first triggered by a short course of radiation, conferring long-lasting control and resistance against cancer. These response rates are improved further by adding surgery to remove the remaining tumour. Better treatments are urgently needed for mesothelioma patients, as ...

Study identifies ways women increase their sexual pleasure during vaginal penetration

Study identifies ways women increase their sexual pleasure during vaginal penetration
2021-04-14
INDIANAPOLIS, IN AND BERKELEY, CA (April 14, 2021) - Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine and OMGYES have conducted the first-ever, large-scale, nationally representative study focused on women's techniques for increasing their own pleasure from vaginal penetration. The findings, published today in the scientific journal, PLOS ONE, identify and name four distinct methods: Angling, Pairing, Rocking and Shallowing. The research was led by Dr. Devon J. Hensel, Associate Professor of Research at Indiana University School of Medicine, and Dr. Christiana von Hippel, an OMGYES Research Scientist. "For the first time, we have ...

Tiny wireless implant detects oxygen deep within the body

2021-04-14
Berkeley -- Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created a tiny wireless implant that can provide real-time measurements of tissue oxygen levels deep underneath the skin. The device, which is smaller than the average ladybug and powered by ultrasound waves, could help doctors monitor the health of transplanted organs or tissue and provide an early warning of potential transplant failure. The technology, created in collaboration with physicians at the University of California, San Francisco, also paves the way for the creation of a variety of miniaturized sensors that could track other key biochemical markers in the body, ...

Massive fragment screen points way to new SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors

Massive fragment screen points way to new SARS-CoV-2 inhibitors
2021-04-14
New research published in Science Advances provides a template for how to develop directly-acting antivirals with novel modes of action, that would combat COVID-19 by suppressing the SARS-CoV-2 viral infection. The study focused on the macrodomain part of the Nsp3 gene product that SARS-CoV-2 uses to suppress the host cell's natural antiviral response. This part of the virus's machinery, also known as Mac1, is essential for its reproduction: previous studies have shown that viruses that lack it cannot replicate in human cells, suggesting that blocking ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Twelve questions to ask your doctor for better brain health in the new year

Microelectronics Science Research Centers to lead charge on next-generation designs and prototypes

Study identifies genetic cause for yellow nail syndrome

New drug to prevent migraine may start working right away

Good news for people with MS: COVID-19 infection not tied to worsening symptoms

Department of Energy announces $179 million for Microelectronics Science Research Centers

Human-related activities continue to threaten global climate and productivity

Public shows greater acceptance of RSV vaccine as vaccine hesitancy appears to have plateaued

Unraveling the power and influence of language

Gene editing tool reduces Alzheimer’s plaque precursor in mice

TNF inhibitors prevent complications in kids with Crohn's disease, recommended as first-line therapies

Twisted Edison: Bright, elliptically polarized incandescent light

Structural cell protein also directly regulates gene transcription

Breaking boundaries: Researchers isolate quantum coherence in classical light systems

Brain map clarifies neuronal connectivity behind motor function

Researchers find compromised indoor air in homes following Marshall Fire

Months after Colorado's Marshall Fire, residents of surviving homes reported health symptoms, poor air quality

Identification of chemical constituents and blood-absorbed components of Shenqi Fuzheng extract based on UPLC-triple-TOF/MS technology

'Glass fences' hinder Japanese female faculty in international research, study finds

Vector winds forecast by numerical weather prediction models still in need of optimization

New research identifies key cellular mechanism driving Alzheimer’s disease

Trends in buprenorphine dispensing among adolescents and young adults in the US

Emergency department physicians vary widely in their likelihood of hospitalizing a patient, even within the same facility

Firearm and motor vehicle pediatric deaths— intersections of age, sex, race, and ethnicity

Association of state cannabis legalization with cannabis use disorder and cannabis poisoning

Gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, and eclampsia and future neurological disorders

Adoption of “hospital-at-home” programs remains concentrated among larger, urban, not-for-profit and academic hospitals

Unlocking the mysteries of the human gut

High-quality nanodiamonds for bioimaging and quantum sensing applications

New clinical practice guideline on the process for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease or a related form of cognitive impairment or dementia

[Press-News.org] Little swirling mysteries: Uncovering dynamics of ultrasmall, ultrafast groups of atoms