The hardness of a material normally is set by the strength of chemical bonds between electrons of neighboring atoms, not by freely flowing conduction electrons. Now a team of scientists has shown that ...

(Nanowerk News) An Australian-led study uses a scanning-tunnelling microscope ‘trick’ to map electronic structure in Na3Bi, seeking an answer to that material’s extremely high electron mobility. To ...

Figure 1: The wall between two magnetic domains (red and blue) creates chiral edge states that act as channels to carry electrons with no loss of energy. (© AAAS) The researchers’ work relies on a ...

The hardness of materials is determined by the strength of the chemical bonds that are formed between the electrons of the neighbouring atoms. For example, the bonds in diamond are very strong, so it ...