Monthly Archives: January 2020

Shake, Graphene

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There is a lot going on in Jorge Pedrós last paper: surface acoustic waves (SAWs), dynamic strain, Raman scattering and optical phonons. At the Instituto de Sistemas Optoelectrónicos y Microtecnología, UPM (together with the Paul Drude Institute in Berlin and the State University of Campinas), they’re using SAWs to modulate the properties of graphene. They’ve proven that “SAWs are powerful tools for modulating the optical and vibrational properties of supported graphene by means of the high-frequency localized deformations tailored by the acoustic transducers, which can also be extended to other 2D systems”. Straintronics, as this new technique is called, employs strain to change and modulate different properties of materials.

We did this picture, under the supervision of Jorge Pedrós, to illustrate their research.

Spin, keep it together!

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The spin of electrons is the best way to storage information… theoretically. This property of electrons is so subtle and erratic that it is virtually impossible to use them in an efficient way. But as everything in science, this is changing.

At Kavli Institute of Nano­science at TU Delft,  they’re starting to control the behavior of spins. By using a thin silver thread, and a 2D material made of tungsten disul­fide, “and using circu­larly polarised light, they’ve created excitons with a specific rota­tional direction”. And what’s more impressive, this experiment works at room temperature. And finally, to make it more interesting, in this process there is no flow of electrons involved, meaning that there is a global energy reduction in the storage of data.

We made this picture to illustrate their experiment.