Researchers have created the world’s highest-performance single-molecule diode. Development of a functional single-molecule diode is a major pursuit of the electronics industry.

Semiconductor lasers are capable of emitting over the full visible color spectrum, which is necessary to produce a white laser, researchers have demonstrated. The technological advance puts lasers one step closer to being a mainstream light source and potential replacement or alternative to light emitting diodes (LEDs). Lasers are brighter, more energy efficient, and can potentially provide more accurate and vivid colors for displays like computer screens and televisions.

Researchers have observed ‘Luttinger-liquid’ plasmons in metallic single-walled nanotubes. This holds great promise for novel plasmonic and nanophotonic devices over a broad frequency range, including telecom wavelengths.

For the first time, researchers have directly seen how organic molecules bind to other materials at the atomic level. Using a special kind of electron microscopy, this information can lead to increasing the life span of electronic devices, for example.

Solar energy could be made cheaper if solar cells could be coaxed to generate more power. A huge gain in this direction has been made by a team of chemists that has found an ingenious way to make solar energy conversion more efficient. The researchers combined inorganic semiconductor nanocrystals with organic molecules to ‘upconvert’ photons in the visible and near-infrared regions of the solar spectrum.

Using powerful computer simulations, researchers have identified a material with a higher melting point than any known substance. The computations show that a material made with hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have a melting point of more than 4,400 kelvins (7,460 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun, and 200 kelvins higher than the highest melting point ever recorded experimentally.

Scientists describe in a new study how they constructed elastic conducting fibers by wrapping lighter-than-air, electrically conductive sheets of tiny carbon nanotubes to form a jelly-roll-like sheath around a long rubber core.

Researchers have developed a method that could improve medical imaging and cancer treatments and increase the efficiency of commercial solar cells by 25 to 30 percent.

Engineers have developed a new approach to structuring the catalysts used in essential reactions in the chemical and energy fields. The advance offers a pathway for industries to wean themselves off of platinum, one of the scarcest metals in Earth’s crust.

By encoding information in photons via their spin, ‘photonic’ computers could be orders of magnitude faster and efficient than their current-day counterparts. Likewise, encoding information in the spin of electrons, rather than just their quantity, could make ‘spintronic’ computers with similar advantages. Engineers and physicists have now discovered a property of silicon that combines aspects of all of these desirable qualities.