September_AMP_Digital

A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 0 8 METALS | POLYMERS | CERAMICS NewAge Industries Inc., Southampton, Pa., a manufacturer of plastic and rubber tubing, announced a significant expansion near its headquarters about 25 miles north of downtown Philadelphia. The company purchased two buildings featuring 46,000-sq-ft of production space and another 3000-sq-ft of office space. newageindustries.com. Yajima Industry Company Ltd., Japan, a manufacturer of automotive and aerospace components and supplier to Subaru of Indiana Automotive Inc., will establish Yajima USA in Purdue Research Park in West Lafayette, Ind. The new location will focus on lightweight components that take advantage of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composites and noncombustible magnesium alloy parts. purdue.edu . BRIEFS FIRST NON-CUTTABLE MATERIAL DEBUTS Researchers at Durham University in England and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute developed a material they call “Proteus” that they say is the first man- ufactured uncuttable material. The com- pound is made of porous aluminum and ceramic, so it is lighter than steel but will withstand any grinder. The team reports that Proteus resists cutting by turning the cutting tools against themselves and dulling them. The material is com- prised of an aluminum matrix, or foam, embedded with ceramic spheres. It is 15% less dense than steel, making it well suited in applications such as light- weight armor. As the cutting tool bites into the aluminum, it suffers extreme vibra- tions when it hits the ceramic spheres. This resonance causes the tool to start bouncing, thereby dulling its cutting edge. Further, as the ceramic is hit, fine dust particles fill in the matrix. The in- teratomic forces between the grains A sample of tungsten ditelluride in an ultrahigh vacuum chamber. Courtesy of AG Bauer. Proteus is currently patent-pending and the team’s goal is to commercialize the material. Courtesy of Fraunhofer Institute. STUDYING TUNGSTEN DITELLURIDE IN REAL-TIME For the first time, physicists at Kiel University (CAU) in cooperation with re- searchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS), both in Germany, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Shanghai Tech Universi- ty, have observed changes to the elec- tronic properties of tungsten ditelluride in real-time experiments. Using laser pulses, they put the atoms in a sam- ple of tungsten ditelluride into a state of controlled excitation and were able to follow the resulting changes in the electronic proper- ties using high-precision measurements. “If these laser-in- duced changes can be reversed again, we es- sentially have a switch that can be activated optically, and which can change between different electronic states,” explains CAU professor Michael Bauer. Such a switching process has al- ready been predicted by another study, in which researchers from the U.S. were able to directly observe the atomic movements in tungsten ditelluride. Some of the electrons in tung- sten ditelluride are highly mobile, so they are excellent information carriers for electronic applications. This is be- cause they behave like so-called Weyl fermions, say researchers. Weyl fermi- ons are massless particles with special properties that have previously only been observed indirectly as quasi-par- ticles in solids like tungsten ditelluride. To capture the minute changes in the electronic properties, a highly sensi- tive experimental design, extremely precise measurements, and extensive data analysis were required. Follow-up research aims to explore whether such electronic switching processes can be triggered even faster—directly by the irradiating laser pulse—as has already been predicted for other topological materials. www.uni-kiel.de.