Many hopes are pinned on spintronics. In the future it could replace electronics, which in the race to produce increasingly rapid computer components, must at sometime reach its limits.

Many hopes are pinned on spintronics. In the future it could replace electronics, which in the race to produce increasingly rapid computer components, must at sometime reach its limits.

Like astronomers tweaking images to gain a more detailed glimpse of distant stars, physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have found ways to sharpen images of the energy spectra in high-temperature superconductors — materials that carry electrical current effortlessly when cooled below a certain temperature.

Sales of organic products are booming: Consumers want their food to be untainted. To avoid the use of fungicides yet nevertheless protect plants from disease, researchers have developed a method that involves bombarding seeds with electrons to kill fungal spores and viruses.

Diamond-based magnetic imaging could prove a boon in materials science, biology, medicine

A team of scientists led by researchers from Princeton University has discovered a new way that electrons behave in materials. The discovery could lead to new kinds of electronic devices.

A team of researchers, at Princeton University's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and from the Universities of Michigan and Florida, has observed electrons moving through a crystal of bismuth metal behaving like light.

Jülich scientists have succeeded in precisely measuring atomic spacings down to a few picometres using new methods in ultrahigh-resolution electron microscopy.

University of Oregon researchers trying to flip the spin of electrons with laser bursts lasting picoseconds (a trillionth of a second) instead found a way to manipulate and control the spin -- knowledge that may prove useful in a variety of new materials and technologies.

University of Maryland physicists have shown that in graphene the intrinsic limit to the mobility, a measure of how well a material conducts electricity, is higher than any other known material at room temperature. Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite, is a new material which combines aspects of semiconductors and metals.

PTB scientists achieved to transfer very small charge "packets", comprising a well-defined number of few electrons, between metallic electrons precisely by using a single-electron pump. A single-electron transistor, being able to resolve charge variations of a single electron or less, served as a charge detector to monitor the charge movement.

A new electron microscope recently installed in Cornell's Duffield Hall is enabling scientists for the first time to form images that uniquely identify individual atoms in a crystal and see how those atoms bond to one another. And in living color.