Science & Technology

Gaining control of the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing. Physicists in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered one way to locally add electrical charge to a graphene device.

Jeff Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, was elected a fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. The honor recognizes Catalano’s outstanding contributions to the advancement of the fields of mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry and petrology.

Saori Pastore, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, helps explain what happens in nuclei when they decay, scatter among each other or come into contact with subatomic particles. Her recent paper, “Weak Transitions in Light Nuclei,” published in Frontiers in Physics, contributes to a body of increasingly accurate, descriptive calculations of nuclear structure and reactions.

Li Yang, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, conducted research with black phosphorus — a material with a thickness of just a few atomic layers — in a study that is hailed as a milestone of the past 50 years by the Physical Review B, an academic journal of the American Physical Society.

Researchers from physics and chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis leveraged data from nuclear scattering experiments to make stringent constraints on how neutrons and protons arrange themselves in the nucleus. Their predictions are tightly connected to how large neutron stars grow and what elements are likely synthesized in neutron star mergers.

A new study finds that Earth’s water may have come from materials that were present in the inner solar system at the time the planet formed — instead of that water being delivered by far-reaching comets or asteroids. The research co-authored by physicist Lionel Vacher in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis is published Aug. 28 in Science.

The behavior of electrons determines the fundamental properties of any material, such as its ability to conduct electricity. Erik Henriksen, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, takes advantage of strange-but-true qualities of graphene to search for correlated motion of electrons.

Bhupal Dev, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, proposes a new way to leverage data from ultra-high energy neutrinos from large neutrino telescopes such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.

Presolar grains — tiny bits of solid interstellar material formed before the sun was born — are sometimes found in primitive meteorites. But a noble gas analysis from physicists in Arts & Sciences reveals evidence of presolar grains in part of a meteorite where they are not expected to be found.