Why do certain materials emit electrons with a very specific energy?

20-Nov-2020

It is something quite common in physics: electrons leave a certain material, they fly away and then they are measured. Some materials emit electrons, when they are irradiated with light. These electrons are then called "photoelectrons". In materials research, so-called "Auger electrons" also play ...

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A new way to design materials

16-Nov-2020

Crystal symmetry is one of the decisive physical attributes that determines the properties of a material. In particular, the behaviour of an electron is largely affected by the symmetry of the crystal which in turn governs the fundamental behaviour of the material, such as its conductive or ...

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How to design organic solar cell materials

29-Oct-2020

A collaboration of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Germany and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia have recently scrutinized organic solar cells and derived design rules for light-absorbing dyes that can help to ...

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Researchers conduct experiments to demonstrate inertial motion in magnetic materials: Groundwork for ultra-fast data storage

09-Oct-2020

In the journal Nature Physics, an international team of scientists from Germany, Italy, Sweden, and France report on their experimental observation of an inertial effect of electron spins in magnetic materials, which had previously been predicted, but difficult to demonstrate. The results are the ...

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Hot Electrons – a very special form of heat transport in metals

01-Oct-2020

When heating a platinum layer on nanometer scales, heat can be transferred by hot electrons through a copper layer into a nickel layer without significantly heating the copper in between. This unusual form of heat transport was discovered by a research group around Jan-Etienne Pudell and Matias ...

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Mapping the atomic motion during a molecular vibration

22-Sep-2020

One of the long-standing goals of research on the light-induced dynamics of molecules is to observe time-dependent changes in the structure of molecules, which result from the absorption of light, as directly and unambiguously as possible. To this end, researchers have developed and applied a ...

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Surprising results reveal a new aspect of extremely strong electric fields in liquid water

08-Sep-2020

Water molecules undergo ultrafast dithering motions at room temperature and generate extremely strong electric fields in their environment. New experiments demonstrate how in presence of such fields free electrons are generated and manipulated in the liquid with the help of an external terahertz ...

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Physicist demonstrates the dynamics of electron-light interaction originating from first principle

02-Sep-2020

With the highest possible spatial resolution of less than a millionth of a millimetre, electron microscopes make it possible to study the properties of materials at the atomic level and thus demonstrate the realm of quantum mechanics. Quantum-physical fundamentals can be studied particularly well ...

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Why do different measurements of material properties sometimes give different results?

02-Sep-2020

It is very hard to take a photo of a hummingbird flapping its wings 50 times per second. The exposure time has to be much shorter than the characteristic time scale of the wing beat, otherwise you will only see a colorful blur. A very similar problem is encountered in solid-state physics, where ...

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“Electron movements are the key events in chemical reactions”

24-Aug-2020

Electrons are able to move within molecules, for example when they are excited from outside or in the course of a chemical reaction. For the first time, scientists have now succeeded in studying the first few dozen attoseconds of this electron movement in a liquid. To understand how chemical ...

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