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

Engineered defects in crystalline material boosts electrical performance

Engineered defects in crystalline material boosts electrical performance
2021-05-27
(Press-News.org) AMES, Iowa - Materials engineers don't like to see line defects in functional materials.

The structural flaws along a one-dimensional line of atoms generally degrades performance of electrical materials. So, as a research paper published today by the journal Science reports, these linear defects, or dislocations, "are usually avoided at all costs."

But sometimes, a team of researchers from Europe, Iowa State University and the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory report in that paper, engineering those defects in some oxide crystals can actually increase electrical performance.

The research team - led by Jürgen Rödel and Jurij Koruza of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany - found certain defects produce significant improvements in two key measurements of electrical performance in barium titanate, a crystalline ceramic material.

"By introducing these defects into the material, we can change, modify or improve the material's functional properties," said Xiaoli Tan, an Iowa State professor of materials science and engineering and a longtime research collaborator with Rödel.

In this case, the engineered defects led to a five-fold increase in dielectric properties (that restrict the flow of current) and a 19-fold increase in piezoelectric properties (that internally generates an electric field when subject to mechanical stress), Tan said.

Special tools for special measurements In addition to Tan, two other Iowa State researchers helped the project's international research team explore fundamental materials questions: Lin Zhou, a scientist in materials science and engineering and the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory; and Binzhi Liu, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering.

With support from the National Science Foundation, the three contributed their expertise in transmission electron microscopy - technology that can show the structures and features of materials by shooting a beam of electrons through thin samples and recording an image. The images have much higher resolution than light microscopy and can show fine details down to the scale of individual atoms.

Key to the project was the Ames Laboratory's Sensitive Instrument Facility built in cooperation with Iowa State. The building was built in 2015 with nearly $10 million from the Department of Energy. It provides a vibration- and static-free environment for electron microscopy at the highest possible resolutions.

"It's a state-of-the-art electron microscopy facility," Zhou said. "It provides an ultra-stable environment so we can achieve atom-level images of material and at the same time acquire chemical information.

"It's a great platform for research and educating the next generation of materials scientists."

A better material for capacitors? For this project, the electron microscopy team quantified the evidence that line defects in a crystalline material can boost electrical performance, Liu said.

The numbers showed that "the dislocations can significantly alter the behavior of other fine features in the material," Liu said.

Tan said the finding could have big implications for the electrical capacitor industry.

There are hundreds of capacitors in your cell phone and the market for them is huge, Tan said. The ceramic material tested in this project has been widely used in capacitors, but the defect-induced boost in electrical performance could make it better. It is also lead-free and less-toxic than other material options.

And so, the researchers wrote, these engineered line defects could turn into "a different suite of tools to tailor functional materials." And this "functional harvesting" could be good for our electronics, and even our environment and health.

INFORMATION:

Read the paper "Control of polarization in bulk ferroelectrics by mechanical dislocation imprint," Science, May, 28, 2021.

The research team Iowa State University: Xiaoli Tan, Binzhi Liu
Iowa State/Ames Laboratory: Lin Zhou
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany: Marion Höfling, Xiandong Zhou, Enrico Bruder, Fangping Zhuo, Bai-Xiang Xu, Karsten Durst, Jurij Koruza, Jürgen Rödel
EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne: Lukas Riemer, Dragan Damjanovic
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands: Pedro Groszewicz


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Engineered defects in crystalline material boosts electrical performance

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Researchers develop technique to functionally identify and sequence soil bacteria one cell at a time

Researchers develop technique to functionally identify and sequence soil bacteria one cell at a time
2021-05-27
Researchers from the Single-Cell Center at the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a technique to sort and sequence the genome of bacteria in soil one bacterial cell at a time, while also identifying what its function is in the soil environment. Their study was published in the journal mSystems on May 27. Soil is home to a vast and complex microbiome, which features arguably the highest genomic diversity and widest heterogeneity of metabolic activities of cells on Earth. In turn, these metabolic activities can in principle provide the foundation for industrial production of numerous compounds of value. The ability to pinpoint ...

Shedding new light: A new type of immunosensor for immunoassay tests

Shedding new light: A new type of immunosensor for immunoassay tests
2021-05-27
Immunosensors are widely used in immunoassays to detect antigens. One such immunosensor is a quenchbody (Q-body), which contains a modified antibody fragment with a quenched fluorescent dye. When an antigen binds to the Q-body, the dye leaves the antibody and the fluorescence intensifies. The change in fluorescence intensity is easy to measure, making Q-body-based antigen detection systems incredibly simple. However, this method requires an external light source to excite the electrons in the fluorescent dye to produce luminescence. One way to solve this is to induce luminescence by an alternative method. To achieve this, researchers ...

Climate skeptics not easily persuaded by available evidence, now or later

2021-05-27
EUGENE, ORE. -- May 27, 2021 -- Climate skeptics who aren't persuaded by the existing evidence from climate change are unlikely to change their minds for many years, according to a newly published quantitative study by a University of Oregon environmental economist The central question posed by the study published in the journal Climate Change was "How much evidence would it take to convince skeptics that they are wrong?" The answer depended on the degree of skepticism. The study modeled two types of hypothetical skeptics -- those who were less extreme and believed the change in temperature was slight, as well as ...

Not fear, but goal importance and others' behavior makes you favour COVID-19 measures

2021-05-27
While earlier research has mostly looked into factors such as fear, perceived risk, age and political views to determine what makes individuals and societies more or less willing to drastically change their lifestyle and support government-imposed strict restrictions, in order to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychologists at the University of Zurich Charlotte Kukowski, Katharina Bernecker and Veronika Brandstätter took a different perspective. Instead, they chose to find out the impact of people's perception of others' behaviour when it comes to the public good, as well as people's own self-control in sticking to behaviour guidelines. By using data from the United Kingdom and Switzerland, they concluded that, ...

Fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria has a glowing new weapon

Fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria has a glowing new weapon
2021-05-27
AUSTIN, Texas -- In the perpetual arms races between bacteria and human-made antibiotics, there is a new tool to give human medicine the edge, in part by revealing bacterial weaknesses and potentially by leading to more targeted or new treatments for bacterial infections. A research team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has developed chemical probes to help identify an enzyme, produced by some types of E. coli and pneumococcal bacteria, known to break down several common types of antibiotics, making these bacteria dangerously resistant to treatment. "In response to antibiotic ...

The robot smiled back

The robot smiled back
2021-05-27
New York, NY--May 27, 2021--While our facial expressions play a huge role in building trust, most robots still sport the blank and static visage of a professional poker player. With the increasing use of robots in locations where robots and humans need to work closely together, from nursing homes to warehouses and factories, the need for a more responsive, facially realistic robot is growing more urgent. Long interested in the interactions between robots and humans, researchers in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia Engineering have been working for five years to create EVA, a new autonomous robot with a soft and expressive ...

Archaeology: Prehistoric violence at Jebel Sahaba may not have been single event

2021-05-27
Reanalysis of the prehistoric cemetery Jebel Sahaba (Sudan), one of the earliest sites showing human warfare (13,400 years ago), suggests that hunter-fisher-gatherers engaged in repeated, smaller conflicts. The findings are published in Scientific Reports. Healed trauma on the skeletons found in the cemetery indicates that individuals fought and survived several violent assaults, rather than fighting in one fatal event as previously thought. Isabelle Crevecoeur and colleagues reanalysed the skeletal remains of 61 individuals, who were originally ...

Icebergs push back

Icebergs push back
2021-05-27
Shortly before Jakobshavn Isbræ, a tidewater glacier in Greenland, calves massive chunks of ice into the ocean, there's a sudden change in the slushy collection of icebergs floating along the glacier's terminus, according to a new paper led by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. The work, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that a relaxation in the thick aggregate of icebergs floating at the glacier-ocean boundary occurs up to an hour before calving events. This finding may help scientists better understand future sea-level rise scenarios and could also help ...

Jebel Sahaba: A succession of violence rather than a prehistoric war

Jebel Sahaba: A succession of violence rather than a prehistoric war
2021-05-27
Since its discovery in the 1960s, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery (Nile Valley, Sudan), 13 millennia old, was considered to be one of the oldest testimonies to prehistoric warfare. However, scientists from the CNRS and the University of Toulouse - Jean Jaurès (1) have re-analysed the bones preserved in the British Museum (London) and re-evaluated their archaeological context. The results, published in Scientific Reports on May 27, 2021, show that it was not a single armed conflict but rather a succession of violent episodes, probably exacerbated by climate change. Many individuals buried at Jebel Sahaba bear injuries, half ot them caused by projectiles, the points of which were found in the bones or the fill where the body was located. The ...

Association of tracheostomy with outcomes in patients with COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 transmission among health care workers

2021-05-27
What The Study Did: The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis indicate that enhanced personal protective equipment is associated with low rates of SARS-CoV-2 transmission during tracheostomy. Authors: Phillip Staibano, M.Sc., M.D., of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2021.0930) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

CMD-OPT model enables the discovery of a potent and selective RIPK2 inhibitor as preclinical candidate for the treatment of acute liver injury

Melatonin receptor 1a alleviates sleep fragmentation-aggravated testicular injury in T2DM by suppression of TAB1/TAK1 complex through FGFR1

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals Shen-Bai-Jie-Du decoction retards colorectal tumorigenesis by regulating the TMEM131–TNF signaling pathway-mediated differentiation of immunosuppressive dendritic ce

Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B Volume 15, Issue 7 Publishes

New research expands laser technology

Targeted radiation offers promise in patients with metastasized small cell lung cancer to the brain

A high clinically translatable strategy to anti-aging using hyaluronic acid and silk fibroin co-crosslinked hydrogels as dermal regenerative fillers

Mount Sinai researchers uncover differences in how males and females change their mind when reflecting on past mistakes

CTE and normal aging are difficult to distinguish, new study finds

Molecular arms race: How the genome defends itself against internal enemies

Tiny chip speeds up antibody mapping for faster vaccine design

KTU experts reveal why cultural heritage is important for community unity

More misfolded proteins than previously known may contribute to Alzheimer’s and dementia

“Too much going on”: Autistic adults overwhelmed by non-verbal social cues

What’s driving America’s deep freezes in a warming world?

A key role of brain protein in learning and memory is deciphered by scientists

Heart attacks don’t follow a Hollywood script

Erin M. Schuman wins 2026 Nakasone Award for discovery on neural synapse function and change during formation of memories

Global ocean analysis could replace costly in-situ sound speed profiles in seafloor positioning, study finds

Power in numbers: Small group professional coaching reduces rates of physician burnout by nearly 30%

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage: A comprehensive review of CCUS-EOR

New high-temperature stable dispersed particle gel for enhanced profile control in CCUS applications

State gun laws and firearm-related homicides and suicides

Use of tobacco and cannabis following state-level cannabis legalization

Long-term obesity and biological aging in young adults

Eindhoven University of Technology and JMIR Publications announce unlimited open access publishing agreement

Orphan nuclear receptors in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease development

A technological breakthrough for ultra-fast and greener AI

Pusan National University researchers identify key barriers hindering data-driven smart manufacturing adoption

Inking heterometallic nanosheets: A scalable breakthrough for coating, electronics, and electrocatalyst applications

[Press-News.org] Engineered defects in crystalline material boosts electrical performance