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Graphene percolation for stronger artificial muscles
The image depicts a human muscle-like bundle of fibers made of exfoliated graphene in liquid crystal elastomers exhibiting strong photo-thermal actuation and enhanced mechanical properties.
IMAGE: Sang Ouk Kim, KAIST, COVER DESIGN: Amie Fernandez
A strong and tough human muscle-like actuator fibre is developed by exploiting 2D graphene fillers within a liquid crystalline elastomer matrix. Reversible percolation of the graphene filler network endows the artificial muscle with a work capacity and power density beyond those of human or mammalian muscles.
Introducing nanotextured interfaces simultaneously increases the light-harvesting ability, optoelectronic properties and fabrication yield of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells. In this way, the efficiency limit of conventional silicon solar cells is surpassed, paving the way to higher-performance photovoltaics.
Low-noise amplification of feeble microwave signals is essential for superconducting quantum circuitry. Now, a gate-tunable Josephson parametric amplifier made from graphene shows 24 dB amplification paired with 10 MHz bandwidth and –130 dBm saturation power.
Parametric amplifiers enable the low noise readout of systems with intrinsically low energy scales. Now, a parametric amplifier leveraging a graphene Josephson junction exhibits a gate-tunable working frequency and a gain exceeding 20 dB with added noise close to the standard quantum limit.
Twisting bilayer graphene to specific angles can yield correlated phases. A superconducting quantum interference device made from this magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene makes it possible to control the phase drop across a Josephson junction in this material.
Magnetic textures at the nanoscale are usually hard to resolve. This high-resolution electron microscopy method enables the imaging of the internal structure of magnetic textures with higher resolution and precision than the optical limit of the instrument.
The technology commonly used for sewer pipe repairs emits airborne nanoplastic particles at a scale that may impact the environment and air quality in urban areas.
The valley pseudospin of electrons may serve as an additional degree of freedom for future on-chip low-energy signal processing. Now, a nanophotonic circuit that integrates a monolayer of WS2 routes valley indices unidirectionally via the chirality of the photons.
Introducing local, nanoscopic ferromagnetic regions in a synthetic antiferromagnet racetrack can help to mitigate the trade-off between energy efficiency and thermal stability in magnetic domain-wall-based devices.
The reversible percolation of a graphene filler network in a liquid crystalline elastomer matrix enables the realization of mammalian-muscle-like actuation.
A one-step simultaneous van der Waals integration of high-k dielectrics and contacts enables the realization of top-gated transistors with atomically clean and electronically sharp interfaces.
Cation exchange membranes embedded with MnO2 nanoparticles form selective outer-sphere complexes with phosphate ions imparting an extremely selective permeation pathway.