After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of ...

Physicists have discovered that excitons -- excited electrons bound to empty electron 'holes' -- can exist stably and travel rapidly through metal. Because excitons can be generated by energy from ...

(Nanowerk News) Quantum mechanics can seem a bit confounding, so for a quantum material to be called “strange” is really saying something. A Cornell-led collaboration has used state-of-the-art ...

Copper, platinum, aluminum, gold. Metals have been so important in human history that we’ve named historical epochs (the Bronze Age, the Iron Age) for their transformative power. These materials, with ...

Lithium-metal batteries (LMBs) are rechargeable batteries that contain an anode (i.e., the electrode through which current flows and a loss of electrons occurs) made of lithium metal. Compared to ...

Computers, mobile phones and all other electronic devices contain thousands of transistors, linked together by thin films of metal. Scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, have developed a method ...

The presence of impurities or defects, also known as disorder, in a metal could hinder the flow of free electrons. Beyond a critical value, such disorder could completely stop electron flow, turning ...

We describe electricity as a flow, but that’s not what happens in a typical wire. Physicists have begun to induce electrons to act like fluids, an effort that could illuminate new ways of thinking ...