GoKawiil
Tech News
A multi-institution research team reports achieving wafer-scale epitaxial growth of p-type boron carbon nitride (BCN) that exhibits high carrier mobility. The work involved collaborators from Japanese and Taiwanese institutions, including support from JSPS, JST, Academia Sinica and Taiwan's NSTC, with computational resources provided by Taiwan's National Center for High-performance Computing.
Researchers led by Tseng and colleagues, publishing in Nature, describe a boron carbon nitride (BCN) material that efficiently transports positive charge carriers, or holes. This addresses a long-standing gap in atomically thin semiconductor research, where efficient electron-transporting 2D materials existed but comparable hole-transporting counterparts were lacking.
Physicists have built an optical atomic clock based on the rare-earth element lutetium that would drift by less than one second over roughly 260 billion years, making it the most precise timekeeper reported so far. The clock measures time using the frequency of visible light absorbed by lutetium atoms. Researchers say its design is stable enough that they aim to miniaturize it for use outside the laboratory.
Researchers led by Xiang-Feng Zhou at Yanshan University created a previously unknown form of pure boron, called Imma-B60, using a two-step high-pressure synthesis involving sodium followed by vacuum heating to remove sodium impurities. The resulting material is deformable and has an electrical conductivity over a million times greater than that of typical, poorly conducting boron phases, according to a study published in Nature Chemistry.