Most solid materials we rely on, from steel, to plastics and ceramics, are designed to have specific properties. Whether a material is soft and flexible, or stiff and tough depends on how molecules ...

Most materials, especially metals and ceramics, are crystals. Their atoms are arranged in three-dimensional lattices that repeat the same exact pattern, over and over again. But there's a well-known ...

Crystal polymorphism is critically important in the fields of pharmaceuticals and materials science. For instance, a metastable polymorph of an active pharmaceutical ingredient may benefit from ...

UB chemist Jason Benedict and his team spent years developing photoswitchable crystals. Every crystal’s shape is a mirror of the internal arrangement of their molecules, but the molecules in ...

(Nanowerk News) For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. This technique works ...

When scientists study how materials behave under extreme conditions, they typically examine what happens under compression. But what occurs when you pull matter apart in all directions simultaneously?

Defect-filled lead-halide perovskites rival silicon solar cells because domain walls inside the material separate and guide charges. Researchers visualized these charge-transport networks using a ...

Virtual apertures let researchers isolate and solve atomic structures from individual nanocrystals embedded in dense clusters, providing valuable new data for energy and pharmaceutical applications.

The best candidate for next-generation magnetic devices—technology that can power, store, sense or transport information—may be, counterintuitively, antiferromagnets. Today, the most widely used ...