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How do you keep the world’s tiniest soda cold? UCLA scientists may have the answer.

A team led by UCLA physics professor Chris Regan has succeeded in creating thermoelectric coolers that are only 100 nanometers thick — roughly one ten-millionth of a meter — and have developed an innovative new technique for measuring their cooling performance.

“We have made the world’s smallest refrigerator,” said Regan, the lead author of a paper on the research published recently in the journal ACS Nano.

To be clear, these miniscule devices aren’t refrigerators in the everyday sense — there are no doors or crisper drawers. But at larger scales, the same technology is used to cool computers and other electronic devices, to regulate temperature in fiber-optic networks, and to reduce image “noise” in high-end telescopes and digital cameras.

Ultrashort light pulses on the time scale of attoseconds provide a window into some of the fastest electronic effects occurring in solid-state systems. Obtaining structural information through coherent diffractive imaging is usually done with monochromatic x-ray sources. However, ultrashort pulses are inherently broadband, and getting transient structural information on such short time scales is challenging. Rana et al. describe a method that works with the broadband nature of ultrashort pulses. They split the pulses into 17 different wavelengths and then used an algorithm to computationally stitch together the diffraction patterns from each wavelength to reveal the structural image optimized across all wavelengths. Demonstrating the technique at optical wavelengths illustrates the feasibility of applying the method to ultrafast x-ray pulses.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 086101 (2020).

A new algorithm could allow researchers to capture attosecond, multiwavelength images of an object. Illuminating a sample with attosecond x-ray pulses could let researchers image phenomena as fleeting as the rearrangement of electrons during chemical reactions. The uncertainty principle dictates that ultrashort pulses have a broad energy spectrum. However, because focusing different wavelengths typically requires multiple sets of optics, most attempts at attosecond imaging are spectroscopic, ignoring all but one radiation frequency. Now, Jianwei Miao at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have developed an innovative algorithm that can simultaneously reconstruct multiple images of an object at different wavelengths using attosecond pulses. The method offers a way to take spectroscopic images without the need for sophisticated instruments.

Extremely thin films of dielectrics and other materials play vital roles in many types of advanced microelectronics, but their tiny dimensions and atomic make-up can impair mechanical performance.

Now, researchers at the NSF STROBE Science and Technology Center in the U.S. have shown they can characterize the mechanical properties of silicon-carbide films as thin as 5 nm using tabletop sources of extreme ultraviolet laser light—showing them to be far softer than thicker films of the same material (Phys. Rev. Mater., doi: 10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.4.073603).

CU Boulder researchers have used ultra-fast extreme ultraviolet lasers to measure the properties of materials more than 100 times thinner than a human red blood cell. The team, led by scientists at JILA, reported its new feat of wafer-thinness this week in the journal Physical Review Materials. The group’s target, a film just 5 nanometers thick, is the thinnest material that researchers have ever been able to fully probe, said study coauthor Joshua Knobloch. “This is a record-setting study to see how small we could go and how accurate we could be,” said Knobloch, a graduate student at JILA, a partnership between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He added that when things get small, the normal rules of engineering don’t always apply. The group discovered, for example, that some materials seem to get a lot softer the thinner they become.

Many of the life’s elementary processes and material properties are determined by how molecules couple and interact. Until recently, it’s been impossible to see how these molecules interact with each other with a high enough resolution. The Raschke Group has used infrared lasers and a new microscope to get a high-resolution view of molecular coupling in porphyrin nanocrystals.