Point defects (e.g. missing, extra or swapped atoms) in crystalline materials often determine the actual electronic and optical response of a given material. For example, controlled substitutions in ...

Materials that emit and manipulate light are at the heart of technologies ranging from solar energy to advanced imaging systems. But even in well-studied materials, some fundamental behaviors remain ...

A method using low-refractive-index colloids and confocal laser scanning microscopy enables direct imaging and analysis of defects within colloidal crystals in water, providing real-time insights into ...

When crystal defects are present in an ensemble of spinning colloids that induce transverse forces on each other, the defects assemble into grain boundaries that can break the system apart into a set ...

Order doesn’t always form perfectly—and those imperfections can be surprisingly powerful. In materials like liquid crystals, tiny “defects” emerge when symmetry breaks, shaping everything from cosmic ...

A new hybrid layered perovskite featuring elusive spontaneous defect ordering has been found, report scientists. By introducing specific concentrations of thiocyanate ions into FAPbI3 (FA = ...

Forward-looking: Researchers at the University of Chicago have achieved a groundbreaking milestone, storing terabytes of digital data within a crystal cube just one millimeter in size. They ...

Researchers and industries have been using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to study semiconductors' stacking and dislocation faults. This article considers the analysis of crystal structures.

Defect bits: representation of two n-bits along a defect line (shown in black). Shown are the orientations of the rod-like molecules that comprise liquid crystals. (Courtesy: Žiga Kos and Jörn ...

Ripples and imperfections in liquid crystals like those found in TVs could be used to build a new type of computer. Žiga Kos at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and Jörn Dunkel at the ...

Perovskites are among the most extensively studied materials in modern materials science. Their often unique and exotic properties, which stem from perovskite’s peculiar crystal structure, could find ...