The Alchemist Newsletter:Feb 28, 2013

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A new light-emitting technology based on thin films of nanoscopic silicon crystal has been developed by researchers Uli Lemmer, Annie Powell and their colleagues at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and Geoffrey Ozin's team the University of Toronto, Canada. The new SiLEDs silicon-based light-emitting diodes require none of the toxic heavy metals commonly used in other electronic components but can nevertheless generate a range of color. Until now silicon-based LEDs had been limited to red light. Moreover, not only are additional colors now accessible these new devices are more stable than earlier efforts in this area.

Light from Silicon Nanocrystal LEDs

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The development of a unique high-energy X-ray instrument, called the hard X-ray nanoprobe, at the US Department of Energy's Advanced Photon Source (APS) X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials, both housed at Argonne may settle an artistic argument surrounding the tins of household paint Pablo Picasso had lying around his studio. Art critics had long suspected that one of the most (in)famous artist's of the twentieth century had used domestic enamel paints in some of his most outstanding work. New analytical data based on tests of certain works held by The Art Institute of Chicago prove beyond doubt that this was indeed the case. The analysis of course does not prove one way or the other whether the world-renowned cubist was also a painter and decorator in his spare time.

Pablo Picasso: Decorator

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Chemist Martin Moskovits and his colleagues have developed what turn out to be only the first viable alternative to semiconductor-based solar conversion devices in the last 70 years. In conventional solar, photons impinge on a semiconductor surface and generate a current. Moskovits' team has instead turned to a nanoscopic metal forest to generate an electron flow for splitting water to generate hydrogen, one of the end-points for current solar systems. Early prototype systems comprise the complex-sounding but robust system of gold nanorods capped with a layer of crystalline titanium dioxide decorated with platinum nanoparticles, and set in water with a cobalt-based oxidation catalyst deposited beneath.

UC Santa Barbara scientists develop a whole new way of harvesting energy from the sun

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An ancient and lost continent has been unearthed beneath the Indian Ocean thanks to chemical analysis of grains of sand from the beaches of the tropical island of Mauritius. Mauritius lies 900 kilometers East of Madagascar where the oldest basalts have been dated at almost 9 million years. However, a painstaking grain-by-grain analysis of bean sand from Mauritius by Bjørn Jamtveit and colleagues at the University of Oslo reveals tiny zircon crystals. Zirconium silicate crystals resist erosion and change little chemically, even over geological epochs and these crystals are much older than those Mauritian basalts. Indeed, one of the twenty zircons found is almost 2 billion years old and was spat out by fairly recent volcanic activity from fragments of continental crust lying beneath the ocean floor.

Long-lost continent found under the Indian Ocean

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Understanding how certain materials lose their electrical resistance below a certain threshold temperature and become "high-temperature" superconductors remains one of the most tantalizing puzzles in science. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brookhaven National Laboratory have studied electron waves with unprecedented precision in two-dimensional, custom-grown superconductors and revealed that one mechanism that offered hope of such an explanation may actually be unrelated to superconductivity and might actually compete with the true mechanism. Their study might ultimately preclude short-lived fluctuations known as charge-density waves (CDWs) but could help scientists home in on the real mechanism and perhaps one day allow materials scientists to raise the high temperature still further.

Laser Mastery Narrows Down Sources of Superconductivity

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Chemist Steven Wheeler of Texas A&M University has been awarded a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed at stimulating the careers of promising junior faculty members. He will receive funding of $413,000 over five years for work under the umbrella: "controlling supramolecular self-assembly of planar and curved polycyclic aromatic systems." The CAREER award will support research ultimately of interest in the development of organic electronic materials.

Texas A&M Chemist Steven Wheeler Receives NSF CAREER Award

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