Singing sand, also called whistling sand, barking sand, booming sand or singing dune, is sand that produces sound. The sound emission may be caused by wind passing over dunes or by walking on the sand.
Phaedon Avouris is a Greek chemical physicist and materials scientist. He is an IBM Fellow and was formerly the group leader for Nanometer Scale Science and Technology at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
Nanotribology is the branch of tribology that studies friction, wear, adhesion and lubrication phenomena at the nanoscale, where atomic interactions and quantum effects are not negligible. The aim of this discipline is characterizing and modifying surfaces for both scientific and technological purposes.
Spin-density wave (SDW) and charge-density wave (CDW) are names for two similar low-energy ordered states of solids. Both these states occur at low temperature in anisotropic, low-dimensional materials or in metals that have high densities of states at the Fermi level . Other low-temperature ground states that occur in such materials are superconductivity, ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The transition to the ordered states is driven by the condensation energy which is approximately where is the magnitude of the energy gap opened by the transition.
Surface layering is a quasi-crystalline structure at the surfaces of otherwise disordered liquids, where atoms or molecules of even the simplest liquid are stratified into well-defined layers parallel to the surface. While in crystalline solids such atomic layers can extend periodically throughout the entire dimension of a crystal, surface layering decays rapidly away from the surface and is limited to just a few near-surface region layers. Another difference between surface layering and crystalline structure is that atoms or molecules of surface-layered liquids are not ordered in-plane, while in crystalline solids they are.
Marvin Lou Cohen is an American–Canadian theoretical physicist. He is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cohen is a leading expert in the field of condensed matter physics. He is widely known for his seminal work on the electronic structure of solids.
Electron beam ion trap (EBIT) is an electromagnetic bottle that produces and confines highly charged ions. An EBIT uses an electron beam focused with a powerful magnetic field to ionize atoms to high charge states by successive electron impact.
The Tomlinson model, also known as the Prandtl–Tomlinson Model, is one of the most popular models in nanotribology widely used as the basis for many investigations of frictional mechanisms on the atomic scale. Essentially, a nanotip is dragged by a spring over a corrugated energy landscape. A "frictional parameter" η can be introduced to describe the ratio between the energy corrugation and the elastic energy stored in the spring. If the tip-surface interaction is described by a sinusoidal potential with amplitude V0 and periodicity a then
Patrick A. Lee is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
A recurrence tracking microscope (RTM) is a microscope that is based on the quantum recurrence phenomenon of an atomic wave packet. It is used to investigate the nano-structure on a surface.
Swift heavy ions are the components of a type of particle beam with high enough energy that electronic stopping dominates over nuclear stopping. They are accelerated in particle accelerators to very high energies, typically in the MeV or GeV range and have sufficient energy and mass to penetrate solids on a straight line. In many solids swift heavy ions release sufficient energy to induce permanently modified cylindrical zones, so-called ion tracks. If the irradiation is carried out in an initially crystalline material, ion tracks consist of an amorphous cylinder. Ion tracks can be produced in many amorphizing materials, but not in pure metals, where the high electronic heat conductivity dissipates away the electronic heating before the ion track has time to form.
Spin-polarized electron energy loss spectroscopy or SPEELS is a technique mainly used to measure the dispersion relation of the collective excitations, over the whole Brillouin zone.
David R. Nelson is an American physicist, and Arthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics, at Harvard University.
Melik C. Demirel is a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and his research focuses on theory-driven functional materials synthesis and fabrication for designing novel engineering materials to produce next generation materials for an array of fields including energy, biomedicine and security/defense. He received his M.S. and B.S. degrees from Bogazici University. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Michael Lee Roukes is an American experimental physicist, nanoscientist, and the Frank J. Roshek Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Richard Magee Osgood Jr. was an American applied and pure physicist. He was Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at Columbia University.
Band-gap engineering is the process of controlling or altering the band gap of a material. This is typically done to semiconductors by controlling the composition of alloys, constructing layered materials with alternating compositions, or by inducing strain either epitaxially or topologically. A band gap is the range in a solid where no electron state can exist. The band gap of insulators is much larger than in semiconductors. Conductors or metals have a much smaller or nonexistent band gap than semiconductors since the valence and conduction bands overlap. Controlling the band gap allows for the creation of desirable electrical properties.
Erio Tosatti is an Italian theoretical physicist active at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), and at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), both in Trieste, Italy. He is a broad-scope theorist who carried out research on a wide range of condensed matter physics phenomena. His early work dealt with optical properties, electron energy loss, theory of excitons and nonlocal dielectric response in solids, including layer crystals such as graphite and semiconductors; charge- and spin-density-waves; surface physics in all its aspects, particularly reconstruction, roughening and melting, also in clusters; the prediction the Berry phase in fullerene; the first calculated STM map of graphite, now a standard in the field; matter at extreme pressures: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, CO2, iron at earth core conditions, water and ammonia at deep planetary conditions, pressure-induced insulator-metal transitions in layer compounds like MoS2. In nanophysics, he and his group predicted helical structures of metal nanowires; the spontaneous magnetism of metal nanocontacts, including the electronic circumstances for normal or ferromagnetic Kondo effect therein. His and his collaborator's theory of strongly correlated superconductivity was recently confirmed in compounds such as Cs3C60. Pioneering papers on quantum annealing are now basic to current developments in quantum computing. More recently he moved on to the theory of nanofriction, a field where he obtained the ERC Advanced Grant MODPHYSFRICT 2013–2019, and subsequently, as co-PI with an experimental group, another ERC Advanced Grant ULTRADISS 2019-2024. More details of his current and past research activity can be found here.
Single-layer graphene was first unambiguously produced and identified in 2004, by the group of Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, though they credit Hanns-Peter Boehm and his co-workers for the experimental discovery of graphene in 1962; while it had been explored theoretically by P. R. Wallace in 1947. Boehm et al. introduced the term graphene in 1986.
Liliane Léger née Quercy is a French physicist. Her research considers polymers and the molecular mechanisms of adhesion. She was awarded the Groupe Français d’Études et d’Applications des Polymères Prix d’Honneur in 2021.
