A new vibrant blue pottery pigment with less cobalt

29-Feb-2024 - Whether ultramarine, cerulean, Egyptian or cobalt, blue pigments have colored artworks for centuries. Now, seemingly out of the blue, scientists have discovered a new blue pigment that uses less cobalt but still maintains a brilliant shine. Though something like this might only happen once in a ...

Mystery of two-dimensional quasicrystal formation from metal oxides solved

"We are excited to learn whether this special arrangement will produce completely new and useful properties"

31-Jan-2023 - The structure of two-dimensional titanium oxide brakes-up at high temperatures by adding barium; instead of regular hexagons, rings of four, seven and ten atoms are created that order aperiodically. A team at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) made this discovery in colaboration with ...

Efficient, stable, and eco-friendly thermoelectric material discovered

20-Jul-2022 - Waste heat is a very promising source of energy conservation and reuse, by means of converting this heat into electricity—a process called thermoelectric conversion. Commercially available thermoelectric conversion devices are synthesized using rare metals. While these are quite efficient, they ...

Demonstrating Feshbach resonances between a single ion and ultracold atoms

Researchers study the interaction between lithium atoms and barium ion isolated in ultrahigh vacuum and trapped using light traps

20-Dec-2021 - A team led by Prof. Dr. Tobias Schätz, Professor of Atomic and Quantum Physics at the Institute of Physics at the University of Freiburg, Dr. Pascal Weckesser, Fabian Thielemann and colleagues, demonstrate magnetic Feshbach resonances between a single barium ion and lithium atoms at near absolute ...

New material for solid oxide fuel cells

Higher conductivity and lower coefficient of thermal expansion

26-Jul-2018 - Scientists have replaced some of the iron atoms in the composition Nd0.5Ba0.5FeO3-δ by cobalt, while simultaneously increasing the conductivity and lowering the thermal expansion of the material. To improve conductivity through the change in the number of defects as a starting point for the ...

Oxidation of sulfides with perovskite catalyst

Barium ruthenate promises easy handling and high yields

17-Jul-2018 - Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a ruthenium-based perovskite catalyst that shows strong activity even at low temperatures (down to 313 K). The reusable catalyst does not require additives, meaning that it can prevent the formation of toxic by-products. The oxidation of ...

The apparent inner calm of quantum materials

09-May-2018 - Transitions between different phases of matter are part of our day-to-day lives: when water freezes, for example, it passes from liquid to solid state. Some of these transitions may be of a different kind, resulting from so-called topological excitations that force all the particles to act in ...

New bar for water-splitting, CO2-splitting techniques set

01-Sep-2017 - Researchers from North Carolina State University have significantly boosted the efficiency of two techniques, for splitting water to create hydrogen gas and splitting carbon dioxide (CO2) to create carbon monoxide (CO). The products are valuable feedstock for clean energy and chemical ...

New types of structures for cage-like clathrates

08-Mar-2017 - Cage-like compounds called clathrates could be used for harvesting waste heat and turning it into electricity. UC Davis chemists just discovered a whole new class of clathrates, potentially opening new ways to make and apply these materials. A clathrate is basically a cage of atoms with another ...

Fracking plays active role in generating toxic metal wastewater

17-Dec-2015 - The production of hazardous wastewater in hydraulic fracturing is assumed to be partly due to chemicals introduced into injected freshwater when it mixes with highly saline brine naturally present in the rock. But a Dartmouth study investigating the toxic metal barium in fracking wastewater finds ...