A team of researchers at Rice University has engineered a new version of a well-known multiferroic that exhibits orders of magnitude higher performance at room temperature than its parent material. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a modified version of bismuth ferrite that shows a 10-fold increase in magnetization and 100-fold increase in magnetoelectric coupling compared to standard varieties.

For the first time, a research team has demonstrated, in a metal-wall environment, a plasma regime that simultaneously achieves partial divertor detachment, an edge-localized-mode (ELM)-free high-confinement mode (H-mode), and high pedestal performance. This integrated regime was sustained on a minute scale and the work is published in Physical Review Letters.

Researchers have developed tiny flexible lasers that can be used to measure forces inside living cells. The new lasers could help illuminate various biological processes, including those involved in early development and tumor progression.

Spintronic devices enable data processing with significantly lower energy consumption. They are based on the interaction between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers. Now, a team from Freie Universität Berlin, HZB and Uppsala University has succeeded in tracking—separately for each layer—how the magnetic order changes after a short laser pulse has excited the system. The researchers were also able to identify the main cause of the loss of antiferromagnetic order in the oxide layer: The excitation is transported from the hot electrons in the ferromagnetic metal to the spins in the antiferromagnet. The findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.