Watching electrons at work

Looking inside nanocrystals

06-Dec-2023 - Researchers from ETH Zurich, Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology, and Stanford have taken snapshots of the crystal structure of perovskite nanocrystals as it was deformed by excited electrons. To their surprise, the deformation straightened out the skewed crystal ...

A promising breakthrough: Nanocrystals made of amalgam

09-Aug-2021 - Researchers at ETH have managed to produce nanocrystals made of two different metals using an amalgamation process whereby a liquid metal penetrates a solid one. This new and surprisingly intuitive technique makes it possible to produce a vast array of intermetallic nanocrystals with tailored ...

Shiny mega-crystals that build themselves

New mega-crystals exhibit unique properties such as superfluorescence and may well usher in a new era in materials science

28-May-2021 - An international team led by Empa and ETH Zurich researchers is playing with shape-engineered nanoscale building blocks that are up to 100-times larger than atoms and ions. And although these nano "Lego bricks" interact with each other with forces vastly different and much weaker than those ...

A new theory for Semiconductors made of nanocrystals

First theoretical explanation how electrical current moves through a thin film of nanocrystals

30-Jun-2020 - Researchers at ETH have provided the first theoretical explanation for how electrical current is conducted in semiconductors made of nanocrystals. In the future, this could lead to the development of new sensors, lasers or LEDs for TV screens. A few years ago, we were introduced to TV screens ...

A burst of ”synchronous” light

Sandwich structure of nanocrystals as quantum light source

09-Nov-2018 - Excited photo-emitters can cooperate and radiate simultaneously, a phenomenon called superfluorescence. Researchers from Empa and ETH Zurich, together with colleagues from IBM Research Zurich, have recently been able to create this effect with long-range ordered nanocrystal superlattices. This ...

Extremely bright and fast light emission

12-Jan-2018 - An international team of researchers from ETH Zurich, IBM Research Zurich, Empa and four American research institutions have found the explanation for why a class of nanocrystals that has been intensively studied in recent years shines in such incredibly bright colours. The nanocrystals contain ...

Platelets instead of quantum dots

05-Apr-2017 - A team of researchers led by ETH Zurich professor David Norris has developed a model to clarify the general mechanism of nanoplatelet formation. Using pyrite, they also managed to confirm their theory. Scientists have been researching luminous coloured quantum dots (QDs) since the 1980s. These ...