Mantis shrimp or stomatopods, intrigue humans due to their beauty but also fierce predatory behavior.
Scientists demonstrated a strong coupling of very thin ferromagnetic permalloy layers to the antiferromagnetic spintronics compound Manganese Gold. This enabled them to apply well-established read-out methods commonly applied to ferromagnets in antiferromagnetic spintronics as well.
Scientists examined whether honeycomb boron can function as a structural analogue 2D material to graphene. Employing core-level X-ray spectroscopies, scanning tunneling microscopy, and DFT calculations, they analyzed the structure and electronic properties of honeycomb boron after its reaction with aluminum. They found that although it resembles graphene in electronic structure to some extent, it fails to form a quasi-freestanding monolayer on aluminum. This lack of a freestanding state is a clear difference from the behavior of graphene or monolayer hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) on lattice-mismatched metal surfaces.
The chemical bonding in 2-dimensional (2D) MXene material Ti3C2Tx and its precursor Ti3AlC2 was studied at beamline Balder. The relatively newly discovered MXene materials have potential applications from batteries to electronics. A team from Linköping performed the first experiment at Balder in 2019, and the results are now published in Physical Review Research.
In operation since September, Balder beamline has taken its first users to investigate MXenes, a class of nano-crystalline 2D-layered transition metal carbides, carbonitrides and nitrides. Researchers aim to learn more about their fascinating characteristics and how to exploit their material properties for new technologies.