On the quest for miniaturization, scientists at the Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea), in collaboration with researchers from the University of Birmingham and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), develop credit card-thick, flat lenses with tunable features. These optical devices, made of graphene…
2-D Electronics: Metal or Semiconductor? Both
Modern life will be almost unthinkable without transistors. They are the ubiquitous building blocks of all electronic devices: each computer chip contains billions of them. However, as the chips become smaller and smaller, the current 3D field-electronic transistors (FETs) are reaching their efficiency limit. A research team at the Center for Artificial Low Dimensional Electronic…
Can The Donut-Shaped Magnet ‘Cappuccino Submarine’ Hunt for Dark Matter?
Scientists at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research (CAPP), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) optimized some of the characteristics of the magnet to hunt for one possible component of dark matter called axion. Although it sounds hard to believe, everything we see with our naked eyes or through microscopes and telescopes…
Explaining How 2-D Materials Break at the Atomic Level
Cracks sank the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic; decrease the performance of touchscreens and erode teeth. We are familiar with cracks in big or small three-dimensional (3D) objects, but how do thin two-dimensional (2D) materials crack? 2D materials, like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), have emerged as an important asset for future electronic and photoelectric devices. However, the mechanical properties…
Making Graphene Using Laser-Induced Phase Separation
All our smart phones have shiny flat AMOLED displays. Behind each single pixel of these displays hide at least two silicon transistors which were mass-manufactured using laser annealing technologies. While the traditional methods to make them uses temperatures above 1,000°C, the laser technique reaches the same results at low temperatures even on plastic substrates (melting…