“This opportunity is one I didn’t envision even five years ago,” says Louis Piper, associate professor of physics at Binghamton and the principal investigator for the grant, awarded last week. “We didn’t think it would be possible.”

The instrument, a HArd X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system (or HAXPES), allows researchers to get detailed information about a device or material without taking it apart.

HAXPES relies on the photoelectric effect, one of the most important tools in condensed matter physics and in materials science (and the basis for Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize). The machine shines light (in this case hard X-rays) into a material. The material accepts the energy and momentum and kicks out electrons. Conservation of energy and momentum allows researchers to determine the chemical and electronic structure of the material being studied.

This is the kind of energy you’d use for a chest X-ray at the hospital, Piper explains. And HAXPES will let him study a device like a battery in a way that leaves the battery intact, just like your doctor wouldn’t remove your rib cage for that chest X-ray.

“We can see what we previously couldn’t see,” Piper says.

That’s because other techniques are surface-senstitive. They’re good at scanning the outer layer of a device, but don’t offer a view of what’s inside. It would be like looking at a ham and cheese sandwich but only seeing the outermost crumbs on the bread. “It might not be a good representation of the material or what the material is like when it’s in contact with other materials,” Piper notes.

HAXPES requires a powerful source of X-rays and an extremely sensitive detector. The techniques associated with it have been used for about a decade, but previously were only possible with a synchrotron — a kind of particle accelerator that generates X-rays. At those facilities, visiting scientists typically conduct experiments over a period of hours and then leave.

HAXPES will provide synchrotron-comparable data in a laboratory setting, which makes it much more forgiving in terms of time and much more useful for private industry.

Compared to similar instruments, HAXPES offers more kinetic energy, which means excited electrons have a greater chance of escaping from deeper within the solid. That increases the tool’s sensitivity to the bulk of a material being examined. “Bulk” is a relative term in this case; HAXPES may go 60 nanometers deep into a material vs. 5 nanometers with other tools.

Still, at 60 nanometers, scientists will be able to access interfaces of real devices such as transistors. They’ll be able to measure energy levels and the chemical composition of buried interfaces without tearing them apart.

Piper, who is also the director of the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton, says the new equipment dovetails with the campus’ industry-level capabilities. “We want to have unique tools that can act as a bridge between computational modeling and real-world applications,” he says.

The HAXPES, made by European company Scienta-Omicron, should be ready for use within two years at Binghamton’s Smart Energy R&D Building, part of the Innovative Technologies Complex.

The campus has a long history of industry partnerships and of creating multiuser laboratories to benefit academic and private R&D. The HAXPES should extend those collaborations in exciting ways, notes Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence focused on electronics packaging research. “Equipment like this adds to our unique capabilities at Binghamton and brings value to our relationships with major technology companies and startups alike,” Sammakia says. “Louis is a national leader in this area, and I am eager to see what he can accomplish with HAXPES on campus.”

The HAXPES is about the size of a pickup truck, and Piper notes that the Binghamton tool will have several upgrades. “I consider it the Cadillac of HAXPES instruments,” he says.

That is, if a Cadillac could generate hard and soft X-rays and take low-temperature measurements as well as high-temperature measurements.

The instrument will have four key areas of focus:

• Batteries
• Next-generation electronics
• Neuromorphic computing
• Solar energy harvesting

In addition, researchers in the humanities may use the HAXPES’ small vacuum chamber to study pigments and clays. The tool will tie into Binghamton’s Materials Matter course, an interdisciplinary class that brings principles of science to life for humanities students and future scientists alike.

Piper sees the lab-based HAXPES enabling him and his colleagues to continue developing ways to describe chemical concepts to students from other disciplines.

He says he’s already seen firsthand how HAXPES could change materials research, as the technique allowed researchers to observe how electrons degrade and how that effects batteries’ performance.

“At Binghamton, we solve industry-relevant problems,” Piper says. “Photoemission has long been a powerful technique for materials studies, but has been largely been limited to sterile, perfect crystals. This instrument is very flexible and means we can measure real materials and devices even while they’re in operation. This tool means we’ll be able to make significant contributions in smart energy technologies.”

Flexible electronics are exactly what they sound like. Current technologies include curved-screen phones and computer monitors. Eventually, consumers could see a flexible iPad in stores.

Tomlinson, a junior majoring in physics and mathematics, is involved in the Smart Energy research stream of the Freshman Research Immersion program (FRI), where he started this work by trying to reproduce flexible heterojunctions.

A heterojunction is the basic component of a thin film transistor, which has applications in LED lights and other electronic devices.

Most heterojunction materials crack when they are bent, which disrupts the flow of electricity. Finding heterojunction materials that can bend without cracking allows for the creation of flexible electronics.

This has already been accomplished; Tomlinson’s research builds upon earlier work. His efforts helped to refine the fabrication of a novel material for a piece of the junction.

Tomlinson then conducted research last summer to identify the hurdles that come with fabricating these junctions to set a strong foundation for further research by future FRI students.

“The incoming group of FRI students now working on this project are exploring a novel material that is very similar, chemically, to the one I explored over the summer,” Tomlinson says. “My research has made it so that the same model and parameters should work for this new material that they’re doing the research on.”

The applications also extend to solar panels.

“An LED is the opposite action to a solar cell; a solar cell absorbs light and an LED emits light,” Tomlinson says. “So you can have flexible solar panels that are easier to place than just the regular ones.”

Tomlinson, who grew up around the Finger Lakes, has been passionate about the sciences since high school. He was attracted to physics and math by the challenge of both subjects. “I’m drawn to the mysteries surrounding physics and how it fundamentally describes the world around me,” he says.

Marissa Civic, research assistant professor for the Smart Energy FRI stream, highlights Tomlinson’s dedication. “Peter is a strong student, very interested in science, and enjoys doing research,” she says. “Peter volunteered to do summer research in my lab; he spent hours a day in the lab working on his project as it interested him.”

Tomlinson also enjoys hiking, canoeing, camping and running. In high school he was on the cross country and track teams. “I enjoyed the exercise and being part of a team,” he says. “I now run recreationally and enjoy the days I can meet up with BU’s running club.”

Tomlinson says the flexible electronics project left him with a curiosity about other kinds of research. “I spent two years or so on the FRI project, and I want to get the most out of my college experience,” he says. “I think it would be exciting to explore new research opportunities.”

Pegor Aynajian, whose research focuses on quantum phase transitions, will receive $531,582 over five years through the NSF’s CAREER program, which supports early-career scientists.

Aynajian starts with a simple magnet you might find on your refrigerator when he explains phase transitions. “If you raise the temperature above its critical temperature, it becomes a regular metal,” he says of the magnet. “It won’t stick anymore. That’s called a phase transition.”

Specifically, that’s a thermal phase transition, just like the transition from water to ice. That’s a transition we see all the time. Now consider what would happen if we took a fridge magnet and cooled it to absolute zero, zero Kelvin (or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Achieving a phase transition at absolute zero, say by tuning some parameter, can be remarkable, Aynajian says. Rather than thermal, though, it’s called a quantum phase transition.

“Near quantum phase transitions, new states of quantum matter are born,” he says. “We call it the physics of emergence.”

Under those conditions, scientists have found novel electronic phases — including superconductors — that aren’t seen otherwise.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance, when cooled below a certain temperature.

This funding will accelerate Aynajian’s research into discovering emergent phases of matter with an emphasis on “unconventional” superconductors. He’s also interested in ferromagnetic superconductors, which are rare and poorly understood.

Aynajian’s group built a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which uses quantum physics to “see” electrons on the surface of a sample. With this tool, they can observe the spatial patterns electrons form near a quantum phase transition. Many materials have never been studied this way before.

Aynajian’s group also uses X-rays and neutrons at research facilities around the world.

“Our STM is giving us new and unprecedented experimental results,” Aynajian says. “We can see what electrons do, how they form a new state of order, which did not exist before. Our next goal is to figure how we can ‘twist’ this order to create a new superconductor. Working directly with theorists helps us find ways to understand them further.”

Superconductors, which physicists have been studying for about a century, work at very low temperatures, which is a challenge to their practical use. In the past 30 years or so, physicists have found some materials that are superconductors at somewhat higher temperatures. If scientists can find a “room-temperature” superconductor, it would be a tremendous breakthrough for the electric grid and electronic devices of all kinds. That sort of technology could save billions of dollars in energy costs, Aynajian says.

Aynajian, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013, began studying superconductors in graduate school and continued working with them during a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He credits Bernhard Keimer, his graduate school mentor at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, with bringing him into the field.

The CAREER award will give Aynajian an opportunity to do some mentoring of his own, both with his graduate students and with children in Greater Binghamton. He plans to develop hands-on experiments and playful activities with superconductors, including a mini magnetic-levitation train, to inspire area students and offer some exposure to ideas in physics.

As for the experimental aspect of the project, he’s optimistic. “No matter what we find,” he says, “it will be interesting.”

“All technology now, say, your cellphones, laptops and most any kind of handheld and especially nano-based technology, are all based on silicon,” says Nick Quackenbush, a PhD candidate in physics at Binghamton University. “We’re close to the limit with silicon. There are fundamental physical limits to how small you can make it and have it still actually work.”

Quackenbush and other researchers are looking to push beyond the limitations of silicon by using metal oxides — chemical compounds that contain at least one oxygen atom and one other metal element. That will be the focus of his research when he starts a prestigious National Institute of Standards and Technology postdoctoral research program in December at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Metal oxides include some of the best — and worst — conductors of electricity. Their properties can change abruptly with temperature, light and electricity. And when two insulating metal oxides touch, a conductive channel can form under certain conditions that can be controlled like a switch.

“Understanding how and why this happens could enable us to build oxide-based electronics that are better and even more compact than our current silicon-based nano technologies,” Quackenbush says.

Louis Piper, an assistant professor of physics at Binghamton and Quackenbush’s advisor, said the two have also worked on separate but related research with applications for “smart windows.” Such windows, Piper says, could block infrared light and allow natural light to enter a room without the downside of feeling the heat or glare of the sun. “So at the moment I’m in my office, the sun is beaming down on my glass, I want to put the blinds down and turn the lights on, which is not really energy-efficient,” Piper says. “It would be better if I could just block the infrared and take advantage of the ambient lighting.”

Piper said another possibility for the metal oxides Quackenbush studied at Binghamton would be to use them as “memristors” — tiny devices that can store information permanently, switch on and off in billionths of a second and use very little power.

To research these possibilities, Quackenbush will spend his three-year fellowship at Brookhaven working on the National Synchrotron Light Source II, which will be the world’s most advanced synchrotron when it’s fully operational. A synchrotron emits high-energy X-rays that researchers use to study materials.

Quackenbush beat out a number of proposals from larger physics programs such as Harvard’s, making his postdoctoral fellowship a coup for Binghamton as well. And Piper says Quackenbush has the right personality to do well.

“If Nick doesn’t understand something, he will devote his time to ask the questions needed to understand it,” Piper says. “People often shy away from what they don’t know, but Nick has learned that research is all about asking the difficult questions. I expect he will be able to answer some of these questions with his fellowship.”

Michael Lawler, a theoretical physicist at Binghamton University, contributed to the research, which he considers a great achievement for the experimentalists on the team.

The researchers use a very small tool, bringing its tip close to a sample of material they want to examine. They then apply a voltage between them and try to drive a current. In this experiment, Lawler explained, they were able to change the tip by picking up a nano-sized “flake” of a material with a normal metallic tip so they could apply voltage from one superconductor to another.

Superconductors are materials — either “conventional” or “bad” metals at ambient temperatures — that conduct electricity without resistance below a certain temperature. For decades, it was thought that these materials could conduct electricity only at temperatures far below freezing. Since the mid-1980s, however, scientists have discovered several compounds that superconduct at much higher temperatures.

Lawler and his colleagues study a class of materials called cuprate superconductors, compounds including copper and oxygen that superconduct at relatively high temperatures (below 90-150 Kelvin). This particular experiment operated at about 50 millikelvin, which is about as cold as the research group can go, to reduce noise in the measured current.

“This is a better and different way of looking at these cuprate materials than has previously been possible,” says Lawler, who compared the new technique to the difference between looking at stars with a telescope and looking at the X-rays stars produce.

Scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) with a superconducting tip allowed the group to observe the surface of these materials in a completely new way.

“Before now, what we’ve known is that there are lots of waves present in these materials. You can think of the charge changing in a wavelike pattern, where the wave is 4 atoms across.”

In this experiment, the team was able to look at the superconductivity at the atomic scale for the first time. “They’re observing that superconductivity can have waves in itself,” Lawler says. “And that’s the first time that’s ever been observed.”

If you look at the amplitude of the wave, it’s relatively modest. “It didn’t surprise me, though people were hoping for something more dramatic,” Lawler says.

These experiments suggest that other materials — “tuned” with different amounts of oxygen — could produce different results, possibly more dramatic waves.

In principle, a room-temperature superconductor could allow electricity to travel with zero energy loss from power plants to houses and make possible advanced high-speed trains and cell phone towers. Physicists are still working to understand the origin of high-temperature superconductivity.

“I’m excited about seeing this wave that we can now probe directly,” Lawler says. “We can find out if there are materials where this dramatic wave happens. They would be different kinds of superconductors than we typically study.”

In addition to Binghamton University, the team included scientists from Harvard University, Cornell University, University of St. Andrews, Seoul National University, the Institute of Basic Science in Seoul, the Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, the University of Tokyo, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

Shawn Sallis wants to know why.

“It’s unclear what’s causing the problem,” says Sallis, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Binghamton University. “The electrodes start as a powder, which is mixed with a liquid binder to create a paste. That makes it really hard to disentangle exactly what’s going on as the material starts to degrade, and it’s going to require a lot of work to find out.”

To solve the puzzle, Sallis is spending this school year on a prestigious fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., where he’ll be working with the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a synchrotron that produces a beam a billion times brighter the sun. By bombarding his materials with X-rays, Sallis can observe the electrons as the battery charges and recharges, and gain a better understanding how the surface and subsurface degrade.

“We need facilities like the one in Berkeley to answer why we’re not reaching the full potential of these materials,” says Louis Piper, an assistant professor of physics who serves as Sallis’ faculty advisor. “They’re not behaving as they should, and we suspect the differences between the surface and the interior of these nanoparticles that make the electrodes is responsible. If we can determine what’s occurring, then we can consider how to overcome the problem. Over the past few years, Shawn has gained a lot of experience, which makes him the natural candidate.”

Since coming to Binghamton in 2010, Sallis has co-authored 17 published papers, presented his work at five national conferences and won an award for Best Poster for the oxide semiconductors symposium at the fall 2012 Meeting of the Materials Research Society. He has already conducted research at ALS, as well as at the National Synchrotron Light Source on Long Island and at Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom.

“It’s very expensive to make the kind of X-rays we need to do this work,” says Sallis, who grew up in rural Cortland County, the son of a nurse and a long-haul truck driver, before graduating from SUNY Cortland in 2010. “Improving batteries is going to be a long, hard process with a lot of incremental steps. So I’m really excited to go back to ALS, where I’ll be able to focus on my research, help other people with their experiments, and see a lot of science I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world.”

In a tiny lab tucked away in the basement of Science II, a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers is studying the properties of transparent conducting oxides (TCOs).

Typical transparent materials, such as glass and plastic, are not great conductors of electricity, yet TCOs are used in electronics such as phones and laptops. Zachary Lebens-Higgins, a senior physics major from Rochester, hopes that classifying TCOs by their physical properties will allow him to determine why they have conductive properties.

Developments in this field have already led to the creation of touch-screen technology that is used in phones and tablets, along with the solar cell. “My hope is that with our characterizations we will, down the road, better understand these systems and be able to make devices — in particular solar cells — cheaper and more sustainable,” Lebens-Higgins says.

Characterizing these materials is a very broad field to research, so the Binghamton team collaborates with several other labs around the world. “We are trying to create a cohesive story,” Lebens-Higgins says.

This multi-faceted approach includes working with University of College London, University of Bath and Cornell University. The Binghamton scientists conduct research on thin films created in a Cornell lab, and then compare their experimental findings to the theorists’ discoveries abroad, a holistic approach that sets this team apart from the others.

Louis Piper, Lebens-Higgins’ research adviser and an assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, helped nurture his thirst for knowledge. He chose Lebens-Higgins to accompany him to Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. There, the researchers used advanced spectroscopy technology to supplement their research at Binghamton.

“I usually only take undergraduates there if they have a very promising result,” says Piper, “and Zach’s been down there three times.”

Along with his research on campus, Lebens-Higgins was also selected to travel with a small group of students to Germany. He presented his research, but he says the best part was talking to scientists about their unique approaches to work toward the same goal.

In fact, Lebens-Higgins points to being able to understand the groundbreaking research others are doing as one of the most rewarding parts of his work. It wasn’t easy; he spent an entire summer learning and researching the physics of TCOs before he stepped foot in a lab.

Piper says Lebens-Higgins is a standout among his students, taking on a workload that rivals that of graduate researchers. This work ethic will aid Lebens-Higgins, who has been accepted to a summer undergraduate laboratory internship at Brookhaven to work on photocathode materials. Afterward, he plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a doctorate in physics.

“When the dean or provost says Binghamton is a center of undergraduate excellence,” Piper says, “it is students like Zach they are talking about.”

In 2009, while he was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, Aynajian used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to observe the movement of electrons on the surface of a high-temperature superconductor. “The electrons order themselves in beautiful charge patterns before transforming into a high-temperature superconductor,” he says.

Using intense X-rays, Aynajian and his collaborators observed these patterns within the bulk of the superconductor. This breakthrough led to the 2014 publication of a paper titled “Ubiquitous Interplay between Charge Ordering and High-Temperature Superconductivity in Cuprates” in Science.

“Pegor spent years honing the technology to catch electrons in the act of forming these so-called ‘crystals’ that move in unison,” says Ali Yazdani, a Princeton professor who supervised Aynajian’s work there. “We don’t yet have a clear understanding why these materials superconduct, but we think it comes from the strong interactions between electrons. That’s what Pegor is trying to sort out, and why this work is so important. He’s able to synthesize many different ideas, and … he’s already made a big impact in the field.”

Aynajian received his bachelor’s degree from Lebanese University in Beirut and his doctorate from the University of Stuttgart in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany.

Since arriving at Binghamton in 2013, Aynajian has been setting up a below-ground, ultra-quiet lab, with undergraduate and graduate students constructing Binghamton’s own scanning tunneling microscope. Two semesters later, their STM has passed its first tests of visualizing carbon atoms on graphite and electron waves on copper. This gives sophomores their first view of the quantum world.

“It’s like exploring a new world, like landing on the moon for the first time,” says Aynajian, an assistant professor of physics. “But instead of the cosmos, you’re going to the microcosmos, to the quantum world. You land on a new sample, and for the first time you’re able to see what electrons actually do on this particular material, which makes it so special. That’s a tremendous excitement, but the real reward doesn’t come until you can explain what’s happening.”

“I have the mindset of an investigator, and I really think that’s where my career path is headed,” says Mihalik, a senior physics major from Patchogue, N.Y., who works in the thermoelectric energy generation lab of Bruce White, associate professor of physics and department chair. “I like finding things out, and I view this as a challenge. I know something is happening, and I want to get to the bottom of it.”

According to one hypothesis, the samples might simply be contaminated, possibly through an interaction with ultraviolet light. According to another, there might be a gap in the three omega method, the technique that’s used to test materials in White’s lab and around the world. If that’s true, then Mihalik might be on the trail of something that could change the way scientists measure thermoconductivity, and someday lead to materials that efficiently convert heat to electricity.

“We’re still at the beginning stages of discovery,” White said. “We know there are some strange, non-linear responses creating these spurious measurements. The question is whether we can describe them mathematically, and whether we can get to a level that would allow us to see the appropriate thermoconductivity of the materials we’re testing. If Darin is successful in doing that, it would be a great service to the community.”

During his remaining months at Binghamton — between playing baritone sax in the Harpur Jazz Ensemble, working as president of the College Republicans, leading campus tours and serving as a captain in the Civil Air Patrol — Mihalik is committed to solving this puzzle, hoping it might lead to his first published paper. It could also help him set a course for doctoral work in emerging phenomena, which he calls “one of the greatest mysteries in solid state physics right now. I want to get things done,” he says, “and I want to have a part in helping, really helping people.”

White considers Mihalik a natural leader. “He’s very intelligent, and his work ethic is tremendous,” White says. “That’s a powerful combination. Once he starts working on a problem, he’ll keep coming up with clever ways to attack it, and won’t let go until he’s found a way to solve it. That shows up in the successes he’s having in the laboratory, and I know it will keep showing up in whatever he’s going to do in life.”

A new $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program will enable Stephen Levy, assistant professor of physics, to study how DNA travels through carbon nanotubes.

“You can picture it like spaghetti being sucked through a straw,” he says.

A nanotube is a cylinder made from a sheet of carbon that’s just one atom thick. Fluids travel through these tiny tubes differently than they do through a large pipe, though scientists don’t know exactly why. Some experts hope that nanotubes will lead to a next-generation method of sequencing DNA. Nanotubes may also help scientists understand some aspects of how small molecules are transported into cells.

Levy has developed a way to study one carbon nanotube at a time. Other labs study thousands at once, or use electrical observations of how DNA moves through nanotubes. Levy’s team has developed a way to conduct electrical, optical and fluorescent observations of single-stranded DNA molecules at the same time. His lab has also pioneered a fabrication technique that makes it possible to integrate carbon nanotubes within small fluidic channels.

Levy, who received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond, earned a doctorate from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he did graduate work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He also did a post-doctoral stint with the University of Chicago at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After that, Levy essentially switched fields, leaving particle physics behind and studying biophysics for four years at Cornell University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2010.

Today Levy draws on principles from physics, biology, chemistry and materials science in his research. He’s particularly interested in how DNA, the genetic material found in nearly all living things, travels through these nanotubes. The information in DNA can be thought of as a code of four chemical bases. These four bases pair up in different combinations. Some combinations — or “markers” — are unique to certain animals or molecules and can be used to identify them.

Levy’s research could enable the electrical detection of particular molecules. For instance, a sensor at a post office could be programmed to search for a specific DNA marker. “If you can read where that marker is, it’s almost like a bar code,” Levy says. “You don’t want to sequence every piece of schmutz that goes through there because it takes a long time and it’s fairly expensive. But if you have a quick way of identifying a dangerous molecule, that’s valuable.”

A Binghamton University physicist and his colleagues say they have unlocked one key mystery surrounding high-temperature superconductivity. Their research, published this week in the

Michael Lawler, assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, is part of an international team of physicists with an ongoing interest in the mysterious pseudogap phase, the phase situated between insulating and superconducting phases in the cuprate phase diagram.

“Evidence has been accumulating that this phase supports an exotic density wave state that may be key to its existence,” the physicists write in the new journal article. A density wave forms in a metal if the fluid electrons themselves crystalize.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to visualize the electronic structure of the oxygen sites within a superconductor, the team found a density wave with a d-orbital structure. (The electron density near each copper atom looks a bit like a daisy in the crystallized pattern.) That’s especially surprising because most density waves have an s-orbital structure; their electron density is isotropic. “It’s not the pattern you would expect,” Lawler says.

In this research, Lawler and his colleagues focused on a member of the cuprate class of superconductors called bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO). “We now believe these density waves exist in all cuprates,” says Lawler, a theorist whose contribution to the research involved subtle uses of the Fourier transform, a mathematical analysis that’s useful when examining amplitude patterns in waves.

Superconductors conduct electricity without resistance below a certain temperature. For decades, it was thought that these materials could conduct electricity only at temperatures far below freezing. Since 1987, however, scientists have discovered several compounds that superconduct at much higher temperatures.

Development of this technology could lead to near lossless delivery of electricity to homes and businesses as well as to improvements in cell phone tower receptions and even high-speed trains. 

Louis Piper’s research focuses on metal oxides, a class of materials that includes some of the best insulators as well as some of the best conductors in use today. He and his colleagues, writing this month in the journal Applied Physics Letters, suggest a new method for manufacturing amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-IGZO), a ceramic that looks like glass and can behave like metal, or even like silicon.

Companies such as Sharp and LG already use a-IGZO in some high-end displays. It’s also found in Apple’s new iPad Air. But it has been difficult to maintain transparency and conductivity: In some samples, Piper said, the material took on a brown or yellow tinge that would harm the display’s performance.

Using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to examine the chemical composition and electronic structure of a-IGZO, Piper and his colleagues tested 50 samples, each about a centimeter square and a micron thick. Previous studies have worked with fewer than five samples; this larger effort enabled the physicists to observe trends and conduct data analysis.

The surprising finding of these elaborate experiments? The deep subgap feature, which caused the discoloration in the material, is the result of local variation in oxygen coordination, rather than oxygen vacancies. “There was a lot of detective work,” Piper said. “Several models had suggested missing oxygen played an important role, but our data showed otherwise.”

Eventually, computations conducted by theorists at the University of Bath backed up the experimental findings from Binghamton: Oxygen that has too few positive metal ions surrounding it seems to be the cause of the subgap.

The team not only identified the reason for the subgap feature; it also developed a way to resolve the problem. Low-temperature annealing — heating at 390 degrees Fahrenheit (a temperature you might use when baking a pizza) — allows a-IGZO to retain its conductive properties but removes the subgap states, Piper said.

Bottom line, he said: “You don’t have to sacrifice transparency for conductivity.”

Creating a more reliable production process for a-IGZO will save electronics manufacturers money. It could also reduce energy use, as a fully transparent display can take advantage of ambient light and does not require as much backlighting.

Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.”

Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use.

“We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.”

There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned into electricity. But most of the thermoelectric materials on the market today are not very good at doing that. The tricky part, White says, is getting the heat to flow through the material on the backs of electrons. In most materials, the heat flows in a wave that simply makes the material’s atoms vibrate faster. That’s not a useful phenomenon, and it ends up destroying the important hot-cold differential. In many materials, the vibration of atoms carries away 90 percent of the heat before it can be harnessed.

White’s goal is to create materials where the vibrational effects are minimized — or, in other words, where a larger percentage of the heat gets shuttled by electrons, creating a flow of electricity. He also thinks it’s important to make sure those materials are abundant and nontoxic.

White may have found a candidate in zinc oxide, a substance used in many brands of sunblock. Zinc oxide is abundant, cheap and safe, and it happens to be really good at moving electrons around. Unfortunately, in its normal state, zinc oxide has a molecular structure that transports heat by vibrating atoms instead of turning it into electricity.

By manipulating zinc oxide at the molecular level, White and his colleagues are able to make it better at generating electricity. First, they stretch the material into wires that measure 50 nanometers across. (That’s roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.) That incredible thinness changes the way heat spreads through the material. Next, they embed the nanowires in a silica aerogel, a substance that’s terrible at conducting heat. Because of the interesting and unique interactions that occur at very small scales, nanowires can take on the properties of surrounding materials. In this case, the wires became very poor heat conductors. Their ability to conduct heat through atomic vibrations decreased by a factor of 10, so their efficiency in turning heat to electricity shot up. The results were published in April 2013 in Applied Physics Letters, the top journal in the field.

What’s particularly exciting about this discovery, White says, is that the materials of the wires and the aerogel can be mixed and matched to customize the thermoelectric properties for different applications — such as harnessing waste heat from a power plant, car or household furnace. Since aerogels are nearly transparent, White even envisions making window coatings that exploit indoor versus outdoor temperature differences to generate electricity.

With the right materials, it may be possible to eliminate the internal combustion engine altogether. White and his lab members think they may have a way of doing that. It all comes down to silicon, which is an excellent semiconductor — that’s why our electronic devices are silicon-based — but is also really good at conducting heat via atomic vibrations. White’s group is getting rid of those vibrations by building a silicon-tin composite using a new fabrication technique that grows the material layer by layer.

The work caught the attention of the Naval Research Office, which provides funding for White’s research. “It’s his fabrication method that really makes it different,” says Robert Walters, head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Solid State Devices Branch. “Bruce has developed the fabrication technique that we feel will actually achieve the layered silicon-tin structure, which we think we really need to have to de-couple silicon’s thermal and electrical properties. … It’s a very good idea. It’s innovative and it’s different from other things that we’ve seen.”

The new composite material has a thermal conductivity that’s 1,000 times lower than regular silicon. The group hopes to make it three times lower still by making the crystal purer and more evenly patterned. If the thermal conductivity gets that low, the material would be so good at turning heat into electricity that it could power a car with the burning of a flame.

That’s far off in the future, though. As they work on refining the materials they’ve already developed, White’s group is on the brink of creating less extreme materials that could still have a big impact. Heat-harnessing materials, which could be retrofitted onto a car’s tailpipe or radiator, could soon generate enough electricity to power the car’s electronics. “That alone could increase the fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon,” White says. “When you think about integrating it over the entire automotive fleet, that makes a huge difference.”

Aleksey Kolmogorov, assistant professor of physics at Binghamton, proposed the new superconductor in Physical Review Letters in 2010 and then teamed up with leading experimental groups in Germany, Belgium, Italy and France to test the prediction.

The synthesized material — a novel iron tetraboride compound — is made out of two common elements, has a brand-new crystal structure and exhibits an unexpected type of superconductivity for a material that contains iron, just as predicted in the original computational study.

“Paradigm-shifting superconducting materials have so far been discovered experimentally, and oftentimes accidentally,” Kolmogorov says.

Until now, theory has been used primarily to investigate superconducting mechanisms and, in rare cases, suggest ways that existing materials might be modified to become superconductors. But many proposed superconducting materials are not stable enough to form and those that do form are poor superconductors.

Superconductors, which conduct electric current without any resistance when cooled below a certain temperature, have many interesting applications. For instance, power lines made out of superconducting materials can significantly reduce the energy lost in transmission. Superconducting magnets are also used in high-speed levitating trains and could improve wind turbines.

The phenomenon of superconductivity was discovered more than 100 years ago, with breakthroughs in the 1960s bringing it into practical application in a variety of technologies. The critical temperature, or Tc, for superconductors discovered to date is between 0 and 136 Kelvin (-460 and -214 degrees Fahrenheit). This means that most superconductors require expensive cooling mechanisms. Scientists are still searching for new materials that are superconductors at higher temperatures and can be mass produced.

More than five years ago, Kolmogorov, then at Oxford University, began studying boron-based materials, which have remarkably complex structures and a wide range of applications. He developed an automated computational tool to identify previously unknown stable crystal structures without any input from experiment. His “evolutionary” algorithm emulates nature, meaning it favors more stable materials among thousands of possibilities. (Kolmogorov is a computational physicist, but he also dreams of holding a compound in his hands that he predicted in silico.)

The search revealed two promising compounds in a common iron-boron system, which came as a surprise. Moreover, graduate student Sheena Shah’s calculations indicated that one of them should be a superconductor at an unusually high temperature of 15-20 Kelvin for the considered (so-called “conventional”) type of superconductivity.

Months of double-checking confirmed the preliminary results on the stability and superconductivity of the compound. Still, the 2010 theoretical discovery was met with skepticism.

Natalia Dubrovinskaia and Leonid Dubrovinsky, professors at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, undertook a year-long series of challenging high-pressure experiments and produced a very small quantity of iron tetraboride in the predicted crystal structure, leading to the most recent journal article. Detailed measurements also demonstrated the material’s predicted superconducting property and, unexpectedly, its exceptional hardness.

“The discovery of this superhard superconductor demonstrates that new compounds can be brought into existence by revisiting seemingly well-studied systems,” Kolmogorov says. Now that this material has been synthesized, it may be possible to modify it and raise the temperature at which it becomes a superconductor.

Next, Kolmogorov plans to turn his attention to metal oxides. “They are fascinating because they have applications as catalysts, photovoltaic materials and protective coatings,” he says. “We hope our predictive methodology will lead to more exciting discoveries.”

That idea provided motivation for the latest breakthrough from Binghamton University physicist Michael Lawler and his colleagues, who are searching for the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity.

“Bad” metals, ones that have trouble carrying any electrical current, can become superconductors under the right conditions. “How is it that something that doesn’t conduct normal electricity well becomes such a great superconductor?” asked Lawler, a theorist. He hopes to answer that question, in part by studying materials called cuprates and examining their electronic structure.

The data he and his colleagues analyzed have been available for several years, but have not been well understood. Their findings, that liquid crystal phenomena appear active in cuprate materials, were published this week in the journal Science.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without resistance below a certain temperature. For decades, it was thought that these materials could conduct electricity only at temperatures far below freezing. Since 1987, however, scientists have discovered several compounds that superconduct at much higher temperatures. Development of this technology could lead to dramatic advances in the delivery of electricity to homes and businesses as well as to improvements in cell phone towers and even high-speed trains.

In low-temperature superconductors, the vibration of the atoms is the mechanism of superconductivity. Put simply, Lawler says: “Electrons like to do things together.” Positively charged atoms and negatively charged electrons work together to produce the effect. In high-temperature superconductors, on the other hand, how the electrons begin to work together is not clear.

Lawler and his colleagues believe that the “pseudogap phenomenon,” the vanishing of the low-energy electronic excitations in high-temperature superconductors, is the key to understanding these materials. The team developed a theory related to electronic liquid crystal patterns in these materials and then put it to the test.

What they found can be compared to the design of the American flag. Think of the stars; that’s a crystal pattern. Now think of the stripes; that’s the sort of pattern formed by atoms in “smectic” liquid crystals. It turns out that such “stripes” also arise in cuprate superconductors — keep in mind that each one is only a few atoms thick — but are frequently disturbed by tornado-like vortices. These disturbances take the form of an added or missing stripe in the pattern.

When the physicists examined the sites of these disturbances using a scanning tunneling microscope, they found that there was a direct connection between the vortices and another pattern they discovered earlier. The earlier study revealed a broken symmetry in which electrons flow more easily in, say, the X-direction than the Y-direction.

“In a problem that has gone unsolved for more than 20 years, it is remarkable to find a connection between theory and experiment at this level,” Lawler said. “It is possible that the patterns we focus on inhibit the regular flow of electricity but also help electrons act together to overcome this obstacle. In other words, this could be an enemy that becomes a friend.”

Lawler, who joined the Binghamton University faculty in 2008, collaborated on this paper with researchers at Cornell University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Harvard University and institutions in the Netherlands, Japan and the United Kingdom. To read the paper, visit http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/426.full.

The data Lawler analyzed have been available for several years, but have not been well understood until now. “The pattern looked so mysterious and interesting,” he said. “It’s so different from any other material we’ve ever looked at. Trying to understand what this data is really trying to tell us has been one of our big ambitions, and we think we have captured one of its essential ingredients.”

Lawler, a theoretical physicist, worked with physicists at Cornell University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and laboratories in Japan and Korea on this research. They found what may be the key to unlocking the secrets of the so-called “pseudogap phenomenon” in superconductors.

The “pseudogap phenomenon” is the remarkable vanishing of the low-energy electronic excitations in high-temperature superconductors. A material experiencing this rare phenomenon becomes mostly insulating but otherwise behaves like a superconductor. And because this can happen at room temperature, scientists believe it may be possible for superconductivity to exist at these temperatures.

Superconductors are materials – often but not always metals – that conduct electricity without resistance below a certain temperature. For decades, it was thought that these materials could conduct electricity only at temperatures far below freezing. In the last 20 years, however, scientists have discovered several compounds that superconduct at much higher temperatures.

In principle, a room-temperature superconductor could allow:

• Electricity to travel with zero energy loss from power plants to houses.
• High-speed trains to float on top of the superconductor.
• Cell phone towers that could handle many cell phone carriers in high-population areas.

“It’s one of the most interesting problems that we have in physics,” Lawler said. “I believe that having a challenge at that level can help produce breakthroughs in science.”

He and his colleagues found that the electronic states of two neighboring oxygen atoms in these superconductors are different from each other. Looking at the electronic structure, then, the physicists were able to observe a broken symmetry. “It is like the electronic states were stretched along the X-direction compared to the Y-direction,” Lawler said. “That the pseudogap phase has this order allows us to make the bold claim that it is actually a distinct phase of electronic matter.”

To understand this observation better, consider the phases of rod-like objects. Rod-like polymers have many more phases than the solid, liquid and gas phases of more ordinary atoms. At high temperatures, they are in a gas phase like such atoms. However, at lower temperatures, all the rods can point in one direction while still moving around freely like a gas or liquid. Physicists call this a “nematic phase.” The organization of the rods in this phase is similar to what the researchers observed in the electronic states associated with the pseudogap phenomena.

More phases of rod-like objects exist at lower temperatures until eventually the rods freeze into a crystal. Physicists call these intermediate phases “liquid-crystal phases.” They are responsible for the liquid crystal displays commonly used in watches and televisions.

Lawler, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2008, earned his PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Toronto. A self-described “pencil-and-paper theorist,” he is open to discovery in unexpected places. That was certainly the case with this project, as the inspiration for the data analysis came to him while he was shopping at Home Depot.

The researchers’ success, Lawler said, is owed to both the unusual data analysis—which is derived from radio technology – and the unique capabilities of his Cornell colleagues, who have a scanning tunneling microscope that enables them to look at single atoms while maintaining a large field of view.