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To capture carbon from the environment, we need to first decarbonize the grid

Daniel Morton — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:50:20 +0000

To capture carbon from the environment, we need to first decarbonize the grid Daniel Morton Thu, 05/14/2026 - 10:50

Daniel Morton

Most carbon capture research focuses on the chemistry. A new study from ��ӽ紫ý takes a big-picture look and asks hard questions about the whole system: what does it cost, at scale, and under real-world conditions?

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In 2024, global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 ^oC above pre-industrial levels for the first time. This threshold was set as an aspirational limit by the 2015 Paris Agreement and was considered a line beyond which the impacts of climate change on ecosystem and human vulnerability become stark. Crossing this threshold is a signal that reducing emissions alone will not be enough. Increasingly, scientists, engineers, and policymakers around the globe agree that we will need to actively pull carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the atmosphere to help reduce the impacts of this pollutant. The scale of this task is vast. The International Energy Agency projections suggest that reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 will require removing around one billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year. A billion tonnes of CO₂ is roughly equivalent to the annual CO₂ output of the entire global aviation industry. This vast amount needs to not only be offset from the system but fully removed from it.

This is the problem that has inspired a collaborative team of researchers at RASEI, including RASEI Fellows Prof. Wilson Smith and Prof. Bri-Mathias Hodge, and is the subject of a recent collaborative report published in Joule.

Two ways to catch carbon

Researchers are exploring a number of ways to pull CO₂ directly from the environment, and this comparative study looks at two of them side-by-side. The first, direct air capture (DAC), draws air from the atmosphere through a liquid solution that absorbs CO₂, analogous to a large-scale filter. It is the more established of the two approaches, with the world’s largest DAC facility currently under construction, a plant in Texas designed to remove 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year. The second approach examined in this study, direct ocean capture (DOC), is less developed but works with a natural advantage: it is estimated that the oceans absorb around 30% of the CO₂ that human activity produces each year, meaning seawater is already rich in dissolved carbon that originated in the atmosphere. By extracting that carbon directly from seawater, DOC bypasses the need to process enormous volumes of air. In fact, this advantage is one of the main reasons why many researchers are evaluating the feasibility of DOC as a CO₂ removal solution.

Both approaches share a common challenge: once you have captured the CO₂ from air, you need to do something with it. The regeneration process releases concentrated CO₂ in a usable form, while also recovering the capture solvent. In most current DAC systems, this process requires heating the captured material up to around 900 ^oC, typically by burning natural gas. This process is energy-intensive and creates its own greenhouse gas emissions, somewhat undermining the overall carbon capture process.

To try and understand the impacts of this overall process, the RASEI team modeled what happens when you substitute the heat-based regeneration setup with an electricity-driven alternative called bipolar membrane electrodialysis, or BPMED. Instead of using heat to release the CO₂, BPMED uses electricity to shift the chemistry of the captured solution, enabling the release of CO₂ at ambient temperatures. The key question the team sought to answer was whether this substitution makes economic sense when integrated with DAC and DOC, and under what kinds of conditions.

Building the model

To assess the DAC and DOC pathways, the team built a portfolio of connected models, starting from the physics of how CO₂ is captured and released, moving through the energy demands of each step, all the way up to a full cost analysis. This kind of approach, known as a techno-economic analysis (TEA for short), links the technical performance of a process directly to its economics. A TEA allows you to not just explore whether something works but also gain insight into whether it is viable at scale and under real-world conditions.

A particular strength of this study is the level at which the models connect these dots. As lead author Dr. Hussain Almajed (who started an ORISE Postdoctoral fellowship at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in July of 2025 shortly after graduating with his PhD from ��ӽ紫ý) puts it, the goal was to compare the two approaches “not to say which one is the winner, which one is the loser, but to highlight the trade-offs.” The team pulled data from the California electricity grid, modeled different power supply scenarios, and ran both the DAC-BPMED and DOC-BPMED systems through the same framework. This provided a side-by-side comparison, one that had not previously been explored, that produced some unanticipated observations.

Two technologies, two cost profiles

The comparative study revealed a foundational trade-off rooted in a fundamental difference between DAC and DOC: Concentration. Air contains about 120 times less carbon than seawater, requiring large volumes of air to be processed at every iteration. However, once the CO₂ is captured via a liquid solvent, typically a hydroxide, the comparison reverses. A typical liter of DAC solution contains 0.5 to 1.0 moles of dissolved carbon, which is roughly 160 to 320 times higher than the dissolved carbon in a liter of seawater. That means a DAC plant needs to process far less liquid to recover a given amount of CO₂ compared to DOC, but extracting carbon from such a concentrated solution requires running the BPMED part of the system at high intensity, at high electrical current, which consumes significant energy. The equipment footprint is relatively small, but the electricity bill is high.

DOC works the other way around. Because seawater holds less dissolved carbon compared to a DAC solution, a DOC plant must process vast amounts of seawater to recover the same amount of CO₂. The models estimate that DOC-BPMED would need roughly 20 times more membrane area than the equivalent DAC-BPMED system, representing a significant upfront investment. On the other hand, the electrically driven process can run at a much lower current when handling dilute seawater, using considerably less energy per tonne of CO₂ captured.

These differences are obvious in the cost estimates. For a plant capturing 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year, and connected to the current California electricity grid, the modeled cost of capture via DAC-BPMED came in at around $470 per tonne of CO₂ in the baseline case. For DOC-BPMED, the equivalent figure was around $1,500 per tonne, roughly three times higher. This is driven largely by the upfront cost of all the additional equipment, and not the energy use.

The authors are careful to state that these modeled estimates have a meaningful level of uncertainty built in, and they will shift as the underlying technologies mature. But the overall trends are clear. At present, and with the current equipment costs, DAC-BPMED has a significant cost advantage over DOC-BPMED under this electrically driven regeneration approach.

Unexpected potential routes to profitability

A finding that stood out from these models was an often overlooked commodity side product. The BPMED process works by using electricity to split a salt solution into an acidic stream, which is used to release CO₂, and a basic stream which produces sodium hydroxide (NaOH). Sodium hydroxide is a widely used industrial chemical, a commodity found in a range of industries such as paper manufacturing, water treatment, and chemical synthesis, with an established market value, averaged at around $450 per tonne.

In the DOC model, because the plant is processing such large volumes of seawater, it produces considerably more sodium hydroxide than it needs for its operation. The models show that selling that surplus could reduce the cost of the overall CO₂ capture process substantially. In a scenario projecting a largely decarbonized electricity grid by 2050, the revenue generated from sodium hydroxide sales was enough to fully offset the costs of the CO₂ capture process, and in the most optimistic scenario, the process showed a net profit.

The authors were candid about the limits of this finding. The global sodium hydroxide market, even accounting for projected growth, is not large enough to absorb the products from carbon capture at the scale required to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric CO₂ “Our brief market analysis showed that even if DOC-BPMED supplied 20% of the projected 2050 sodium hydroxide demand, it would still offset less than 0.1% of today’s global energy emissions.” Dr. Almajed said. But the principle illustrated by this finding has broader implications. Coupling carbon capture with the production of a valuable commodity, either carbon-based, or as a side-product, could be a viable route to improving the economics of the whole process. It is an approach that is already being pursued commercially, including by Travertine Tech, a company based in Boulder, Colorado, which captures CO₂ while producing and selling phosphoric acid, gypsum, and cementitious materials.

The electricity issue

Because the BPMED regeneration process is driven entirely by electricity, the source of that electricity matters enormously. This impacts both the cost of the process, and whether it actually delivers a net reduction in atmospheric CO₂. A carbon capture plant powered by fossil-fuel generated electricity that itself emits CO₂ is self-defeating.

To explore how different electricity generation modes impact the overall process, the team modeled four power supply scenarios. The current California grid, a projected 2050 California grid operating at 95% decarbonization, and two off-grid options: dedicated wind and dedicated solar. Interestingly, the team found that connecting to the grid outperformed both off-grid renewable options on cost, in both the current and the projected scenarios. The authors suggest that in the model this is down to a matter of reliability, a grid-connected plant can essentially run continuously, spreading its capital costs across more operating hours. A plant running on dedicated solar or wind is constrained by intermittency, which can drive up the cost per tonne of CO₂ captured. Dr. Almajed highlights that this is an area of the model that could be expanded, “We just looked at solar or wind each by itself, we didn’t optimize the off-grid scenarios to include energy storage and batteries.”

The policy implication built from the observations across the model is clear, explains Dr. Almajed, “We need to really pursue grid decarbonization. We need cleaner energy to power technologies that are going to help address climate change.” Technologies, such as DAC- and DOC-BPMED do not operate in isolation from the broader energy system. The effectiveness of these technologies to help combat atmospheric pollution, both economically and technically, is critically dependent on the grid they are plugged into. Decarbonizing that grid is not a separate problem, it is a prerequisite.

The future of carbon capture

While there are a lot of valuable observations and ideas that have come out of this TEA, no model is perfect. The team was quick to clarify areas where their model could be refined as technologies and ideas evolve. “When technologies are in such a nascent stage, the analysis of these models should focus on qualitative, rather than quantitative, insights” explains Prof. Bri-Mathias Hodge. “While there are a number of areas where the model can be improved, it also suggests where efforts for improvements are best focused, particularly the aspect that have the largest impact on results.” This includes more detailed modeling of the membranes, better data on equipment costs as the technology matures and is more widely deployed, and a more complete optimization of how these carbon capture plants might interact with energy storage or hybrid power systems. Many of these are manageable problems, and work is already underway at RASEI to address some of these areas.

Sometimes, the real value in this kind of analysis is in what it reveals before such refinements are made. By mapping the full system, from the technical fundamentals through the macroscale economics, this study helps to identify where research effort is best directed. Enhancing the concentration of the dissolved carbon in the seawater fed into a DOC plant, for example, could reduce costs by 40-50% according to the study’s sensitivity analysis. As a technology that is beginning to be deployed and scaled, identifying areas where large improvements in process efficiency can be made could have significant energy, and cost savings. As Dr. Almajed notes, “The study generated a lot of insights that we didn’t even consider at the start of the project.”

Removing carbon from the atmosphere at the scale required to significantly impact global emissions is an interdisciplinary problem that spans chemistry, engineering, economics, and energy policy. Analyses such as this don’t necessarily resolve that complexity, but they do help to make it understandable, and act as a roadmap to focus efforts. Knowing where the bottlenecks are, and insights into what it would take to impact them, is a great way to start solving the problem.

May 2026

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Watching Carbon Capture in Action

Daniel Morton — Wed, 13 May 2026 21:00:48 +0000

Watching Carbon Capture in Action Daniel Morton Wed, 05/13/2026 - 15:00

Daniel Morton

Removing carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly from the air, a process called direct air capture (or DAC), is one of several approaches being developed to help reduce the concentration of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

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Among the methods being scaled up, one of the more established involves exposing air to a strongly alkaline liquid, typically a solution of potassium hydroxide (KOH), commonly known as lye. The liquid chemically binds the CO₂, converting it into dissolved salts called carbonates and bicarbonates. Large facilities using this principle are already operating or under construction, with one plant in Texas that is currently under construction, designed to remove 500,000 tons of CO₂ per year.

Despite the maturity of the underlying chemistry, there has been a fundamental limitation in how well researchers can study it. Until now, the process has been something of a black box. Scientists could measure what went into a capture system and what came out, but the detailed chemistry happening inside, specifically in the thin zone where the air and liquid meet, was very difficult to observe directly. This is a meaningful gap, because what happens in that zone determines how efficiently the system works, and how it should be designed, especially for novel DAC liquids. As Jason Pfeilsticker (a Graduate Student in the group of RASEI Fellow Wilson Smith, and lead researcher on this project), explains, “This really is a case of if you want to know about something, just look at, really carefully, and in this case there was some work to do before we could take a detailed look”.

Think of it like medicine before medical imaging. For centuries, doctors understood that the body had internal structures and processes, but could only examine them indirectly, through symptoms, pulses, and what came out of the body. The development of X-rays and later MRI scanning did not change human biology, but it transformed what could be understood and acted upon. A diagnosis that once required guesswork could suddenly be made based on the information gained from mapping out the internal structures of the body. This study, just published in ACS Energy Letters, represents a similar shift for CO₂ capture: rather than inferring what is happening at the gas-liquid interface from indirect measurements, researchers in the group led by Wilson Smith at the University of Colorado Boulder have built an instrument that lets them watch it directly.

The instrument at the center of this work is a custom-designed laboratory flow cell. This device was designed and built specifically for this purpose and, to the teams’ knowledge, is the only one of its kind. “There were so many different variables that we wanted to explore, but in order to design a better process and or screen novel DAC solvents, we needed to have a better picture of what was going on” explains Pfeilsticker, “You can change the solvent, the pressures, the flow, the reactor design, all of which affect the microenvironment and thus the DAC performance ”. To get a clearer picture they set out to build a flow cell with built in features that enabled accurate spatial mapping of the kinetics of the reaction, in real time. Designing and building it required solving a series of practical problems. The cell needed to bring CO₂ gas into contact with flowing KOH liquid through a porous membrane, closely mimicking the interface in a real capture system. It needed to be optically clear and stable enough to allow laser-based measurements without bubbles, vibrations, or chemical interference disrupting the readings. The flow inside needed to be smooth and predictable, what scientists call laminar flow, so that the measurements could be interpreted meaningfully. Each of these requirements shaped the final design, from the choice of materials to the geometry of the flow channels. However, this oversimplifies the actual process, these lessons were learned as part of an extensive prototyping process.

“We made at least 60 or 70 iterations of this cell during the project” explains Jason. “I was drawn to this project because I really like to make things, and this looked like a challenge that would use a great combination of scientific investigation, detailed design and hands-on building”. Jason, who spends much of his free time working on motorcycles, or building electronics and musical instruments, knew he was going to need to iterate on the cell design. Early on the team considered getting design iterations professionally machined. But each of these would cost thousands of dollars to produce, and when you are learning what is important as you are designing, a small tweak here and there can become very expensive. A typical filament-based 3D printer would not be suitable for working with the chemicals involved in DAC. “We identified a resin that was chemically compatible with the base reagents we were using, and we found a cheap resin 3D printer online, that let us do some initial proof-of-principle work, then we upgraded to a better 3D printer for the project, and now we could print iterations for less than a dollar,” said Jason. This not only made the process cheaper but sped-up design development as well. The team identified three big challenges as they worked through the designs: good seals, bubbles, and smooth flow of the liquid. The solutions for these came from a number of inspirations, including sealing mechanisms borrowed from drumheads, reactor geometry angles to reduce bubble formation to enable effective laser probing, shaping of the flow inlets and outlets to ensure laminar flow, and flow dampener design.

To explore the reaction and map out the kinetics of the process the team used a technique called confocal Raman spectroscopy to make their measurements. This works by shining a laser at a point in the liquid and reading the light that scatters back; different chemical species produce distinct signatures, making it possible to identify and quantify them. By scanning the laser across the cell in a grid pattern while the process was running, the team built up two-dimensional chemical maps, essentially pictures showing where carbonates and bicarbonates were forming and accumulating across the contact zone, at the scale of fractions of a millimeter, in real time.

What those maps revealed was not what simple intuition would predict. “We saw that the equilibrium reaction is in effect going backwards near the surface” explained Pfeilsticker. When fresh KOH first contacts CO₂, the highly reactive hydroxide ions in the liquid rapidly consume the incoming CO₂, converting it to carbonate near the membrane. But this rapid reaction locally depletes the hydroxide supply right at the interface. As the liquid flows further through the channel and more CO₂ is absorbed, there are fewer hydroxide ions available near the membrane to drive the reaction forward. “Because it is laminar flow, there is no turbulent mixing” said Jason. The result is that a thin layer of bicarbonate, an intermediate chemical species in the conversion process, forms immediately next to the membrane, nestled between the membrane surface and the main hydroxide and carbonate-rich zone further into the liquid. This pattern becomes more pronounced further along the flow channel and represents a direct, spatial record of the chemistry unfolding in real time.

The team also found that operating conditions matter. Higher flow rates altered the shape and extent of the reactive zone, and doubling the concentration of KOH shifted the balance of products and appeared to reduce the hydroxide depletion effect near the membrane, potentially useful information for future system designs.

A key part of this work was the development of a computational model mirroring, and interpreting, what is going on inside the cell. Using the experimental observations to provide a framework to build the theoretical model allowed the team to effectively bound the scope and validate the model, in ways that would have been essentially impossible without the experimental data. The hope is that this model, which has now been validated with experimental data, in conjunction with flow cell maps can be used by future researchers as an initial screening tool in designing new DAC systems.

This work has the potential for significant impact. DAC Facilities using alkaline liquids are being built at the industrial scale. Researchers are actively developing new and improved capture liquids to make the process more efficient, cheaper, and use less energy. With a cell design that enables accurate mapping, and a computational model that enables faster screening, the process of optimizing the carbon capture reactions can be accelerated. On an industrial scale even small improvements in reaction efficiency and cost can have huge savings on the system scale. Current approaches just look at the input and corresponding output of the cell, like judging a medical treatment by whether the patient recovered, without being able to examine what really happened inside the body.

This research describes a detailed, data-driven approach to answering the questions about what is really happening at the reactive center of DAC: how does a given liquid behave, what is happening at the interface where the chemistry is happening, how does varying the conditions impact the reaction? The combination of the experimental and theoretical tools disclosed by this work provides insight into how these processes work, and the key variables that can be used to optimize it.

The application of these tools can potentially extend beyond DAC. Wherever chemistry and transport interact at an interface, such as electrochemical systems that convert CO₂ into fuels or commodity chemicals, or in the separation of critical minerals. The design of this device was around one specific challenge, but has the potential for broad utility.

The transition from black box to observable system does not, by itself, solve the engineering challenges ahead. Models still need refinement, and scaling to industrial practice requires substantial research. But the ability to directly observe what is happening is a critical step in that process. What was previously assumed can now be tested. The reaction black box now has a window, that enables researchers to gain valuable insights into the inner workings of this critical process.

May 2026

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The solar cell that moonlights as an LED, and does both better

Daniel Morton — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:30:02 +0000

The solar cell that moonlights as an LED, and does both better Daniel Morton Mon, 04/27/2026 - 16:30

Daniel Morton

Imagine a display that harvests ambient light when it is not actively in use, offsetting some of its own energy consumption. The materials physics shows that this is possible, the same semiconductor material can, in principle, emit and absorb light efficiently. What has been missing is a device architecture that allows it to do both without reductions in efficiency of either application. A new study reports a perovskite diode that converts sunlight to electricity at 26.7% efficiency (a world record at the time of publication submission) and emits light at 31% efficiency, figures that would be high for a device designed to do only one of those things.

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Read the Article here

EurekAlert!

The Brighter Side

Metal-halide perovskites are a class of materials named for their distinctive crystal structure, that have emerged over the past decade as some of the most promising candidates for next-generation solar cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). They are relatively inexpensive to produce, can be tuned to absorb or emit different wavelengths of light, and have shown efficiency levels that rival far more costly semiconductor materials. Yet despite sharing the same underlying material, perovskite solar cells and perovskite LEDs have largely been developed as separate technologies, because the physical requirements of each push device design in opposite directions. A collaborative study published in Joule by a team led by Michael McGehee at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Jixian Xu at the University of Science and Technology of China, now demonstrates that this conflict can be resolved, and that resolving it improves both devices at once.

The challenge of doing two things at once

The tension between perovskite LEDs and solar cells comes down to a question of thickness. An effective LED needs an extremely thin, discontinuous layer of perovskite, typically around 50 nanometers (roughly one thousandth the width of a human hair), because thin, slightly uneven films naturally scatter light outward, helping photons escape the device. A solar cell, by contrast, needs a layer roughly sixteen times thicker to absorb enough incoming sunlight and convert it into electricity efficiently. For years, this meant that researchers optimizing a perovskite LED were building something poorly suited to harvesting solar energy, and vice versa. Thanks to these different needs the two applications have followed separate architectural paths, and devices that attempted to do both tended to do neither particularly well.

There is a further complication. Even in a well-made perovskite LED device, much of the light generated inside never escapes. When a photon (a particle of light) is produced inside the material, it travels outward and hits the surface. If it arrives at too steep an angle, it is reflected back inside rather than escaping, a phenomenon governed by the physics of how light moves between materials with different optical properties. Once trapped, that photon bounces around until it is absorbed by a microscopic defect in the material and converted to heat, essentially wasted energy. Reducing these losses requires both giving trapped photons a better route out and patching the defects that absorb them along the way. These have typically been treated as separate engineering problems.

A useful way to think about what the team describe in this research is to consider what a texture does to a pane of glass. Smooth, flat glass transmits light reasonably well in one direction, but offers little control over what happens to light approaching from awkward angles. Some passes through, some reflects, and the behavior is largely determined by the geometry. A textured or patterned surface changes this: by introducing deliberate variations in the surface structure, light arriving from many different angles can be redirected more usefully, whether that means bending it inward toward an internal target (for a solar cell) or redirecting it outward toward an observer (for an LED). The same surface feature serves both directions of travel. The team's approach works on a closely related principle, applied to structures far smaller than any surface texture visible to the naked eye, and with the added benefit that the material forming those structures also repairs the defects that were previously wasting energy as heat.

Building porous textured sponges

Building on earlier collaborative work published in Science in 2023, by McGehee and Xu, which demonstrated that porous alumina nanoplates (a form of aluminum oxide) could reduce energy losses at perovskite interfaces, the team set out to extend that principle into a more sophisticated architecture. The key advance was developing a method to assemble alumina nanoparticles into micrometer-sized islands (each around five micrometers across and half a micrometer tall) embedded within the perovskite device. The assembly process uses electrostatic attraction: two populations of alumina nanoparticles are given opposite surface charges, and when mixed, they cluster together naturally into porous, sponge-like islands. One population is treated with a negatively charged molecule (Me-4PACz) and the other population treated with a positively charged molecule (ODA). The team refer to these as e-Al₂O₃, where the "e" denotes “electrostatic” assembly.

The porous sponge-like structure is critical. Earlier approaches to introducing low-refractive-index materials (materials that are less optically dense than the surrounding perovskite) into LED devices tended to block the flow of electrical charge, undermining device performance. Because the e-Al₂O₃ islands are porous, the perovskite material can grow through them, maintaining electrical contact with the electrode beneath. The islands therefore redirect light without interrupting the charge transport the device depends on.

The surface treatments applied to the alumina nanoparticles were designed to serve a second, equally important function. The molecules used to give the particles their opposite charges are the same molecules known to passivate perovskite surfaces, essentially chemically neutralizing the defects where energy can be lost as heat. The surface recombination velocity, a measure of how quickly electrical charges are lost at interfaces, dropped from 20.2 cm/s in a flat control device to 1.4 cm/s in the e-Al₂O₃ device. This brings the rate of energy loss at the interface close to levels seen in high-performance silicon solar cells.

With defect losses suppressed to this degree, a useful secondary effect called photon recycling becomes significant. When a photon is generated inside the perovskite and would otherwise be trapped and lost, it now has a reasonable chance of being reabsorbed by the material and re-emitted, effectively getting a second, or third, attempt to find an exit. This would be counterproductive in a defect-rich material, because each reabsorption event would risk the photon being lost to heat. However, with defects minimized, photon recycling amplifies the benefit of the improved light routing, pushing external efficiency higher than the geometry of the device alone would predict.

Operated as a solar cell, the e-Al₂O₃ device achieved an externally certified stabilized power-conversion efficiency of 26.7%. At the time this work was submitted for publication this cell held the world record for the power conversion efficiency for perovskite devices (held between 05/2024 – 02/2025). Operated as an LED with the same 800 nm thick perovskite layer, the device reached an external quantum efficiency of approximately 31%, meaning roughly 31 out of every 100 injected electrons produced a photon that successfully escaped the device. Radiance (a measure of light output intensity) was nearly ten times higher than the flat control device. Across both operating modes, the e-Al₂O₃ devices also showed meaningfully improved long-term stability, retaining 95% of their initial solar cell efficiency after 1,200 hours of continuous operation, compared with 67% for the flat control.

The authors note that this combination of greater than 26% solar cell efficiency and greater than 30% LED efficiency in a single polycrystalline device is, across all photovoltaic materials, only the second time this has been demonstrated, the first being single-crystal gallium arsenide, a material that is substantially more expensive and more difficult to manufacture at scale.

The practical implication of a device that converts sunlight to electricity efficiently and emits light efficiently is not merely academic. Displays that harvest ambient light to extend battery life, or lighting systems that recover energy when not actively in use, become more plausible when the same device architecture serves both functions without meaningful compromise in either. More fundamentally, the work demonstrates that the long-standing separation between emissive and photovoltaic device design is not a physical inevitability but an engineering problem, one that careful co-optimization of optical and electronic properties can address.

April 2026

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The Physics That Hides in Plain Sight

Daniel Morton — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:30:34 +0000

The Physics That Hides in Plain Sight Daniel Morton Wed, 04/22/2026 - 09:30

Daniel Morton

Just published; a Perspective article by RASEI theorists raises new questions on what is hidden by quantum symmetry

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Check out the Perspective Here

Some of the most interesting actions happening inside a material are the things that, according to the rulebook, shouldn't be happening at all. In the world of quantum physics, that rulebook is written by symmetry, as encoded by the geometric arrangement of atoms in quantum matter. Essentially, how the atoms are stacked together in a solid. Symmetry sets strict rules about what physical effects are, and are not permitted. For decades, when experiments on certain materials produced results that symmetry said were impossible, the standard assumption was that something had gone wrong: a flawed measurement, or a contaminated sample. A new framework published by the group of Alex Zunger in the journal Matter suggests that in many of those cases, nothing had gone wrong at all. The effects were real. Indeed, they were just hidden—permitted by the local symmetry rules operating in small regions, or neighborhoods, not by the material's overall structure. Understanding where and how these hidden effects occur has practical consequences: the behavior of electrons in magnetic materials underpins technologies from computer hard drives to medical sensors, and knowing the full picture of what electrons can do can save us from discarding potentially critical new materials with hidden technological virtues.

Spin, and why it matters

To understand what this framework is doing, it helps to start with spin itself. Spin is a quantum property of electrons, one that has no obvious everyday analogy, but which causes electrons to behave, in some respects, like tiny magnets with a fixed orientation. In most materials, the spins of individual electrons point in random up or down directions and cancel each other out. But in certain materials, and under certain conditions, spins can be organized spatially and can be controlled. Moreover, even when spins cancel each other out over the global volume of a sample, the local rules operating in smaller regions can have a different spin symmetry, controlling the properties of the sample as a whole.

These unusual spin behaviors control the foundation of a field called quantum spintronics. Spintronics is, broadly, the use of electron spin rather than just electron charge to store, process, and transmit information. The hard drives in most computers already exploit this principle: the read heads that detect stored data work by sensing differences in how electrons with different spin orientations pass through a material. Researchers are working towards spintronic devices that are faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient than what charge-based electronics alone can achieve.

The catch is that developing useful spin behavior out of a material requires the right conditions. This is where symmetry re-enters the picture. The chemical identity and spatial arrangement of atoms in a solid determine its overall properties. Change the atomic arrangement, and you change what spin can do. For this reason, identifying which materials have the right symmetry for a given spin effect has been central to the field. And for a long time, if a material's overall symmetry appeared to rule an effect out, that material was simply set aside.

Walking the streets: a new map of spin physics

The new framework addresses this directly. Rather than treating spin effects as simply present or absent in a given material, it draws a distinction between two types: apparent and hidden effects.

Apparent effects are those that follow directly from a material's overall atomic arrangement. If the global symmetry permits a spin effect, you expect to see it, and you do. Hidden effects are more subtle. They occur in materials where the overall atomic arrangement would, according to the current rulebook, forbid a given behavior, but where smaller, localized regions, or neighborhoods, within the material have their own legitimate symmetry that permits it. The global picture says no; the local picture says yes. The local picture wins. To comprehensively understand the potential spintronic virtues of a material, we need to also understand the mysteries of the local arrangements and symmetries of the spins.

A good way to think about this is to imagine judging a city's architecture and character purely from a satellite image. At that resolution, everything might look uniform and regular. Walk the streets, and observe the neighborhood at eye level, and an entirely different set of structures and interactions becomes visible. The framework outlined in this Perspective is insisting that materials physics needs to walk the streets, and that a great deal can be missed by staying at altitude.

To organize this, the framework described by the Zunger team sorts spin effects in magnetic and non-magnetic materials into distinct categories, determined by two key factors: whether the effect is apparent or hidden and whether the spin effect requires a help from a phenomenon called spin-orbit coupling (SOC)—an interaction emerging from relativistic theory of matter, in which an electron's motion through the electric field of an atomic nucleus influences its spin orientation. Some spin effects depend on this interaction; others do not, and this distinction has meaningful consequences for which materials can host them and how large the effects can be. Check out Box 1 for a deeper dive into these effects.

Box 1:

Apparent spin splitting induced in non-magnetic materials by relativistic SOC: The Rashba and Dresselhaus effect: Across all categories, the framework identifies both an apparent and a hidden version of each effect. The team helps provide understanding around this categorization by providing theoretical physics worked-out examples inspired by real, experimentally studied compounds. For example, in non-magnetic materials, well-known effects called the Rashba and Dresselhaus effects (both involving spin-orbit coupling) producing a separation of electron spin states, have previously overlooked hidden counterparts that can occur in materials whose overall symmetry would appear to rule them out. The framework points to the possibility that there can be materials that violate the nominal conditions for the (apparent) Rashba effect, but a hidden Rashba effect exists. For example, a hidden Rashba effect can show spin polarization even if the global symmetry violates the required broken inversion symmetry, but the structure consists of sectors that are individually non-symmetric. Predicted materials with hidden Rashba spin polarization pointed out by the new framework include tetragonal BaNiS₂ and tetragonal LaOBiS₂, whereas materials with hidden Dresselhaus spin polarization proposed theoretically exhibits local spin texture (the pattern of spin orientations across the material), but no spin splitting include hexagonal NaCaBi, cubic Si, and cubic Ge. This new perspective legitimizes the search for such materials that violate the (apparent) Rashba conditions yet show a (hidden) Rashba effect.

What can be hidden in magnetic materials?

In magnetic materials, hidden spin effects can arise not from the relativistic effect of spin-orbit coupling, but from the magnetic interactions between atoms. This means they can, in principle, be larger, and occur in materials containing lighter, more abundant elements. In both cases, the street-level view of the material is revealing structures and interactions that the satellite image simply could not see. You can find out more about examples of an apparent and a hidden SOC-independent effect in Box 2.

Controlling the electronics of materials

The practical significance of the framework extends beyond classification. The Perspective article explores whether hidden and apparent spin effects can be actively controlled, and, in certain materials, the answer is yes. In some antiferromagnetic compounds, switching between hidden and apparent spin states can be achieved using an electric field. This would be enabled if one could design a material that, in addition to (either apparent or hidden) spin-split AFM symmetry can have the added symmetry of polarity (how electrons are arranged across atoms). This will allow potential applications of the ability to switch spin states using only an electric field.

This is notable for a few reasons. Antiferromagnets carry some practical advantages over the ferromagnets (materials like iron, where all magnetic moments point the same way), that currently dominant magnetic technology. They produce no stray magnetic field, which reduces interference with neighboring components, respond rapidly to switching signals, and are robust against external magnetic disturbances. The ability to toggle spin effects electrically in these materials adds a further tool for device designers to work with.

Box 2:

Apparent, SOC-independent spin splitting in antiferromagnetic materials: Spin configurations consisting of alternation of spin-up layer followed by a spin-down layer are called antiferromagnets. For a long while it was textbook knowledge that electronic states in antiferromagnets would have the same energies for spin-up and spin-down layers (a behavior called “spin degeneracy”) in the absence of SOC. This is because it was assumed that the two atoms with opposite spins will compensate each other, giving rise to spin degeneracy. In 2020, the Zunger group with Emmanuel Rashba discovered the enabling symmetry conditions for the unusual case where electronic states in an antiferromagnets would have different energies for different spin (“spin-split antiferromagnets”) in the absence of SOC. Since this behavior follows the precise symmetry of the system it constitutes an apparent effect. Theorists soon pointed to real materials that would have such peculiar effects, including orthorhombic LaMnO_3, rhombohedral MnTiO₃, tetragonal KRu₄O₈, and tetragonal V₂Te₂Oand many others. This effect was later dubbed in the literature “altermagnetism” implying another form of magnetism.

Hidden, SOC-independent spin polarization in antiferromagnetic materials: In collinear antiferromagnets (collinear, meaning the psins all point along the same axis), this requires that (i) global system symmetry forbids SOC-independent spin splitting, but the (ii) local sectors break that symmetry. Predicted hidden spin polarization materials in magnetic AFM include tetragonal Ca₂MnO₄, La₂NiO₄, and MnS₂, and the following tetragonal compounds CoSe₂O₅, Fe₂TeO₆, K₂CoP₂O₇, LiFePO_4, Sr₂IrO₄, and SrCo₂V₂O₈.

Finding real materials with previously unsuspected hidden effects

The question is how one can use theoretical physics to search for specific materials with target spintronic properties? The history of material research and condensed matter physics has often proceeded via accidental discovery of materials with interesting physical properties—superconductors and light-emitting semiconductor. Yet, for many applications we know well what type of physical properties we want, but we do not know a material that has those target properties. An interesting advance was worked out in the research group of Alex Zunger: namely “Inverse Design”, where you find a material that has a specific, desired target property. The obvious obstacle is that there are innumerably many possible atomic structures that could, in principle, be made even from a few elements and we do not know which structure would have the desired target property. It turns out that modern atomic-resolution quantum mechanics (i.e., electronic structure theory) can now be combined with biologically inspired (evolutionary) “Genetic Algorithms” to scan a truly astronomic number of atomic configurations in genomic-like search of the one(s) that have desired, target materials properties. Once the number of configurations with target property is narrowed down to a few, laboratory synthesis becomes viable. Examples of specific compounds, known to exist but not known to be spintronic relevant were predicted theoretically as a result of this work.

A broad implication of this new framework is that the rulebook has been applied too rigidly. By demonstrating that hidden effects are real and systematic rather than accidental, the framework significantly expands the pool of materials worth investigating for spintronic applications. Materials that were previously set aside because their overall symmetry appeared to rule out useful spin behavior may, on closer, street-level, inspection, host exactly the effects that researchers are looking for, just in a form that requires a more careful look to find.

The Perspective also flags a subtler problem. Some of the theoretical tools routinely used to model materials are themselves guilty of the same “farsightedness” that causes hidden effects to be missed. Certain widely used approximations work at too coarse a resolution to detect local symmetry and therefore fail to predict effects that are genuinely present. Refining the theoretical toolkit is, as the authors suggest, as important as expanding the materials search.

Taken together, this framework offers a more complete account of what electrons can do inside a solid, and one that takes local structure seriously rather than assuming the view from altitude tells the whole story. The physics was there all along. It just required a closer look to find it.

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Possible Solutions for Sustainable Data Centers

Daniel Morton — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:20:07 +0000

Possible Solutions for Sustainable Data Centers Daniel Morton Wed, 04/22/2026 - 09:20

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A recent article published in The Conversation challenges some of the widespread assumptions around data centers. Instead of data centers being an inevitable drain on the communities that host them, with careful design, there are opportunities for more sustainable, and possibly positive, outcomes of hosting a data center. Written by two RASEI Fellows, Gregor Henze and Sean Shaheen, the article argues that with thoughtful design and operation, data centers can actually become local energy assets, providing resilience during outages, and even heating local homes.

The authors, Gregor Henze (Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering) and Sean Shaheen (Professor of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering), draw directly on some of their own research areas to build this case. Their work explores aspects of how data centers could be more sustainably integrated into local energy systems in ways that benefit surrounding neighborhoods. It also explores some future directions that are built on developing new, more energy efficient, computational methods, that could reduce the energy required for equivalent levels of computation.

The piece outlines four main pathways; power management, integration of large battery storage, collection and use of waste heat for district heating systems, and unconventional computing.

Combining these different research perspectives provides an argument that suggests the combining on-site power generation and storage, and waste heat reuse could allow a data center to function as a kind of neighborhood energy hub, one that could provide heat and backup electricity to nearby residents while still serving its core computational function.

The piece was published in The Conversation, and has since been widely republished.

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Colorado Climate Week – RASEI Fellows Discuss AI, Data Centers, and the Future of Clean Energy

Daniel Morton — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 23:56:10 +0000

Colorado Climate Week – RASEI Fellows Discuss AI, Data Centers, and the Future of Clean Energy Daniel Morton Thu, 04/02/2026 - 17:56

Daniel Morton

During Colorado Climate Week 2026, leaders from across academia, industry, and policy came together to explore some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities in the energy transition. The week’s events highlighted the value of collaboration across sectors, bringing together researchers, entrepreneurs, utilities, and students to exchange ideas and share emerging solutions.

Among the many themes discussed, one area that drew particular attention was the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, and clean energy. As AI technologies continue to scale rapidly, so too does the energy demand required to support them. This growing demand raises important questions about how to power digital infrastructure sustainably, and how these same technologies might also accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more resilient energy grid system.

��ӽ紫ý researchers and faculty played an active role in these conversations throughout the week. Panel discussions featuring RASEI Fellows Kyri Baker and Bri-Mathias Hodge offered different perspectives around the impact of integrating datacenters into the grid.

The discussion centered on a key tension: while AI and data centers are driving significant increases in electricity demand, they also present new opportunities to improve how energy systems are planned, operated, and optimized. Rather than viewing data centers solely as a challenge for the grid, the panel explored how they could become more flexible and responsive participants in the energy system.

One area of focus was the potential for better alignment between data center operations and the availability of renewable energy. As more wind and solar resources come online, managing variability becomes an ongoing challenge. Panelists discussed different ways in which the combination of renewable energy and the rise of demand with datacenters can be considered as complimentary in approaches for balancing the grid.

Throughout the discussions, Baker and Hodge emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary approaches. Addressing the energy impacts of AI is not only a technical problem, it also involves community engagement, policy frameworks, and collaboration between traditionally separate sectors. Their insights reflected a broader theme of Colorado Climate Week: that complex climate and energy challenges require integrated solutions.

For attendees, the session provided a great opportunity to learn more, dispel some myths, and gain insights into the concerns and areas of growth that those in the industry are considering.

More broadly, Colorado Climate Week provided a valuable forum for connecting these kinds of conversations across disciplines and organizations. Events throughout the week underscored the importance of continued dialogue and partnership in advancing climate solutions, particularly as new technologies reshape the energy landscape.

As AI continues to evolve and energy systems become more complex, discussions like these will play an important role in shaping how the two intersect.

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Careers in Renewable Energy Panel Discussion

Daniel Morton — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:06:41 +0000

Careers in Renewable Energy Panel Discussion Daniel Morton Thu, 04/02/2026 - 14:06

Daniel Morton

On April 1, 2026, the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), in partnership with Colorado Women of Renewable Industries and Sustainable Energy (WRISE), hosted a panel discussion exploring careers in the renewable energy sector. The event brought together students, researchers, and professionals interested in learning more about the range of opportunities available in this rapidly evolving field.

Colorado WRISE, a local chapter of a nationwide organization, works to accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy future by supporting the education, professional development, and advancement of women in renewable energy. In collaboration with RASEI, the event highlighted both the diversity of career pathways in the industry and the importance of building an inclusive and connected professional community.

The panel featured six professionals representing a wide cross-section of the renewable energy landscape. Panelists included Claire Behar (Foss & Company), Jan Coyle (Ulteig), Professor Tanja Cuk (��ӽ紫ý), Melissa Funsten (Tract), Dr. Nicola Mendoza (Sunforged Solutions), and Terri Walters (��ӽ紫ý). Their collective experience spanned industry, academia, policy, project development, and engineering, offering attendees a broad perspective on how different roles contribute to the clean energy transition.

The discussion began with each panelist sharing a brief overview of their background and career journey. A common theme that emerged was the variety of entry points into renewable energy. Some panelists described following more traditional academic or technical pathways, while others highlighted nonlinear routes that drew on transferable skills from other industries. This diversity of experiences underscored a key takeaway for attendees: there is no single path into the renewable energy sector.

Panelists also addressed the evolving nature of careers in sustainability and clean energy. As the industry continues to grow, so too does the demand for a wide range of skill sets, including engineering, policy, finance, project management, and community engagement. Several speakers emphasized that the energy transition is not only a technical challenge, but also a social and economic one, requiring collaboration across disciplines.

Another important theme was the value of adaptability and continuous learning. Panelists encouraged attendees to remain open to new opportunities, build interdisciplinary and interpersonal skills, and seek out experiences that broaden their understanding of the energy system as a whole. Whether through internships, research, or networking, early career exploration was highlighted as an important step in identifying areas of interest within the field.

Following the panel discussion, attendees had the opportunity to continue conversations during a casual networking session with light refreshments. This provided a valuable space for students and early-career professionals to connect, and to learn more about job and internship opportunities in the renewable energy sector.

Overall, the event provided stories and insights around careers in renewable energy, highlighting both the breadth of opportunities available and the many pathways into the field. By bringing together professionals from different sectors and stages of their careers, the panel provided attendees with a clearer understanding of how they might navigate their own career journeys in sustainability.

RASEI and Colorado WRISE look forward to hosting similar events in the future that continue to connect the campus and broader community with leaders in renewable energy and sustainability.

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Atomic Musical Chairs: How Tiny Nanocrystals Are Informing the Future of Energy-Efficient Electronics

Daniel Morton — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:43:33 +0000

Atomic Musical Chairs: How Tiny Nanocrystals Are Informing the Future of Energy-Efficient Electronics Daniel Morton Tue, 03/17/2026 - 13:43

Daniel Morton

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While most people, when asked about energy innovation, think about some of the "large" technologies, such as wind turbines, long transmission lines, or massive power plants, some of the most important advances in how we use energy are happening at a scale so small that millions of the "machines" involved could fit on the head of a pin.

New research from a team led by RASEI Fellow Gordana Dukovic, working in collaboration with RASEI Fellow Sadegh Yazdi and Prof. Dmitri Talapin from the University of Chicago, reveals new insights on a high-speed game of "atomic musical chairs." This collaboration involved two large teams working together. Researchers from two United States National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers (STCs) including IMOD and STROBE, employed cutting-edge microscopy techniques to directly visualize, for the first time at this scale, how atoms swap places inside tiny semiconductor nanocrystals, which is a crucial step toward understanding the composition, and ultimately the properties, of these materials.

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Science and Technology Centers are hubs for collaboration, bringing together multidisciplinary researchers from across the United States to solve large, challenging and complex problems. This article describes a space where two of these large networks worked together. STROBE, or Science and Technology Center on Real-Time Functional Imaging pushes the boundaries of microscopy to observe and understand materials at the atomic and nano-scales. IMOD, or The Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand, focuses on making atomically precise semiconductors and integrating them into applications in VR displays, and devices for quantum communication and computing. This team leverages the expertise from both Centers to create new semiconductors and using cutting-edge microscopes to observe and understand them.

Almost all of our electronic devices are built from semiconductors. Whether it is the screen on your smartphone, the components in your car, or the microchips in your computer, these electronics rely on semiconductors. Traditionally, these materials are "grown" through rigid and often expensive processes. Tuning the properties of a semiconductor using this approach is not straightforward. If you want a specific color of light for a display, or a specific energy absorption profile for a solar panel, you often have to start from scratch with an entirely different material.

This is where semiconductor nanocrystals offer remarkable opportunities. The specific size, shape, and composition of these tiny nanocrystals determine the physical and electronic properties of the overall material. A particularly powerful process with such nanocrystals is called cation exchange. Instead of building a new crystal from scratch, you can take an existing one and swap out its internal atomic components to change its properties.

“This is a project that we have been working on for a long time” explains Ben Hammel, a graduate student in the Dukovic Group, and lead author on this research. “We have been looking at these materials from the Talapin Group for a long time”.

This work, just published in ACS Nano, focuses on what are called III–V nanocrystals, which are tiny, four-sided pyramids, or tetrahedrons, named for the groups of the periodic table their constituent elements come from (Group III includes elements like Indium, Gallium, and Aluminum; Group V includes Phosphorus, Arsenic, and Antimony). In this research, the nanocrystals are made of a mixture of Indium, Phosphorus, and Arsenic. To exert more control over the properties of these nanocrystals, the researchers introduced Gallium. Adding Gallium is like tuning a guitar string: it changes the energy of the crystal, influencing how it interacts with light.

“A lot of people have developed ways to make III-V bulk semiconductors, but the real challenge is making them into nanocrystals, where you have more control over their properties, and the Talapin Group have developed a really neat molten salt process to do this” explains Hammel. The molten salt work was published in Science in 2024.

Imagine the inside of one of these tiny crystals as a perfectly ordered lattice of "seats." There are two types of players: Anions (the Phosphorus and Arsenic atoms) and Cations (the Indium atoms). A key observation from the team was that the "house" never moves. The Anions are like the floor and the chairs, they stay perfectly still, maintaining the overall crystal framework. The Cations, on the other hand, are the players sitting in those chairs.

In this work, the nanocrystals were placed into a "hot bath" of molten Gallium salts, essentially starting the music on the game of atomic musical chairs. Previous work had shown that the atoms exchange, but there was not a lot of evidence for how this process worked. “Understanding how this works is very important, and finding out more about the local elemental composition, and how the Gallium atoms move can inform how we design these systems in the future” explains Hammel.

These nanocrystals are only 5 to 10 nanometers wide. A typical human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers wide. These crystals are called "nano" for a reason! To observe this game of atomic musical chairs in action, the team used Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM), an instrument that uses a focused beam of electrons to probe and image matter at the atomic scale. “Early on there were some signs that there was heterogeneity within the particles, but it was unclear, a big technical challenge we had to overcome was how we can actually measure the Gallium moving through the nanocrystal” said Hammel.

A key challenge they had to figure out was the sensitivity of the nanocrystals to the very tool being used to study them. The electron beam of the STEM, if used at high intensity, can damage the nanocrystals before a useful image can even be collected. To solve this, the team developed an innovative "statistical" imaging approach. Rather than blasting a single crystal with a high dose of electrons to get a sharp image, the researchers instead took many low-dose, and individually blurry, snapshots of hundreds of different crystals at different stages of the molten salt reaction. “We essentially stacked the data on top of each other” describes Hammel, “If I can add together 10 nanocrystals, I can get 10 times the signal”. Adding these kinds of signals together hadn’t been done before with semiconductor nanocrystals. “A lot of this came together from teamwork, I got a lot of really great suggestions from collaborators on how to collect and analyze this information. I used a suite of open source Python tools, which I was a little lost with until I met the researcher who developed them at a conference (Josh Taillon from NIST), who gave me some great suggestions and ideas” said Hammel. Using these advanced computer algorithms, they aligned and stacked hundreds of images on top of each other. Much like a long-exposure photograph of the night sky reveals stars the naked eye cannot see, this averaged stacked image revealed a detailed map of where the Gallium atoms were moving inside the nanocrystals. To the team’s knowledge, this signal-averaging approach for elemental mapping has not previously been applied to semiconductor nanocrystals.

The Gallium atoms rush in to claim “seats”, but not randomly. Gallium grabs the seats near the surface first. Because of the high surface-to-volume ratio of these tiny particles, this surface exchange causes a dramatic and rapid change in overall composition: within the first 15 minutes in the molten salt bath, the outside of the nanocrystals is substantially transformed. However, as the game goes on, it gets progressively harder. The Indium atoms sitting in the seats at the center of the nanocrystal are crowded in, and for a Gallium atom to reach the core, an Indium atom must fight its way out through an increasingly Gallium-rich lattice. This sets up a compositional gradient, essentially a smooth transition from a Gallium-rich exterior to an Indium-rich core, that persists even after 16 hours of reaction.

This new methodology, combining STEM with advanced computational image processing, is sensitive enough to detect and map the movement of atoms through individual nanocrystals. Applying it here directly revealed that the cation exchange process (Indium being replaced by Gallium) creates a graded composition rather than a simple sharp boundary between materials. The team also used computer simulations (finite element analysis in COMSOL) to model this exchange as a diffusion-limited process, finding that the rate of exchange slows dramatically as more Gallium enters the lattice, likely because the smaller Gallium atoms cause the lattice to contract, making it progressively harder for further exchange to occur.

Importantly, the methods developed in this work are broadly applicable and could be used to determine the elemental composition of many other types of nanocrystals that have previously been difficult to study due to their sensitivity to electron beams.

The ability to observe and better understand the cation exchange process in these semiconductor nanocrystals has significant implications for the development of next-generation materials. It has been suggested that graded compositions, like those observed here, could help suppress certain energy-loss processes in semiconductor devices, potentially enabling more efficient lighting and lower-power electronics. Whether these specific nanocrystals deliver on that promise remains an open and exciting research question, but this work provides the observational foundation needed to begin answering it. Additionally, the molten-salt synthesis approach that underpins this research is an active area of development as a potentially more versatile route to III–V semiconductor nanocrystals, materials that have historically been among the most challenging to synthesize with fine compositional control.

By developing new tools to better observe the game of "atomic musical chairs," the researchers are providing the field with insights into how to engineer materials at the atomic scale and revealing that the path from one material to another is more nuanced, and more interesting, than previously understood.

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Investigating how political polarization impacts efforts to address climate change

Daniel Morton — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:22:40 +0000

Investigating how political polarization impacts efforts to address climate change Daniel Morton Wed, 02/25/2026 - 12:22

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2026 Three Minute Thesis Finalists

Daniel Morton — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:57:33 +0000

2026 Three Minute Thesis Finalists Daniel Morton Tue, 02/24/2026 - 13:57

Daniel Morton

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Meet 3MT Finalist Ben Hammel

Ben Hammel, a graduate student in the Dukovic Group, was a finalist in the 2026 ��ӽ紫ý Three Minute Thesis Competition. We caught up with Ben to find out more about the whole 3MT process.

What is 3MT?

3MT stands for Three-Minute Thesis, which was a competition started at the University of Queensland. I think the history behind it is that they were going through droughts in Australia and everyone had these three-minute egg timers in their showers to limit water usage. Someone had this idea of maybe this was a good challenge for condensing/communicating your research: how well can you present your thesis in three minutes?

What did you have to do?

I came into this wanting to learn how to clearly describe my research. The rubric is really about explaining your science. They look at clarity, your enthusiasm, and about the slide and presentation. But they also look at can you describe the motivation of your research? Can you describe the design of your research? Can you describe the conclusions and societal impact of your work? So it is about science communication, with a strong grounding in the scientific aspects. Going through this process and thinking through these things has given me a better understanding of my own science.

Can you describe your research in five words?

Using microscope to look at nanocrystals. Six, that is ok, right?

What drew you to do the 3MT?

I wanted to improve my scientific communication skills, and I felt like there was something really cool about my research that I wanted to share. It is this simple idea that we need to look at nanocrystals to understand how they work. I get to use this amazing microscope to do just that!

What was the best part of the 3MT program?

The best part was definitely the cohort of talks. In the final competition folks got to see eleven presentations from across the graduate school, and that was awesome, but in the preliminary round there were more than 25. There were so many great talks from so many parts of the school that I got to see. It was really fun. You get to see in an hour so much condensed scientific knowledge. That was definitely the best part.

What was the worst/hardest part of the 3MT program?

The hardest part was talking about the science. It is so easy for me to say “we study these nanocrystals, and they’re cool, and I use this microscope”, but when people really ask me about what are the scientific questions you have and what are the experiments you run to answer them? And how are you going to engineer nanocrystals? It’s difficult to answer these kinds of technical questions in an accessible way.

How do you think your experience in 3MT will help you in the future?

Oh, it’s already helping me! Just in the way I talk to people and explain things. I feel like it has made me intellectually stronger and I am already noticing that it helps me communicate more clearly and think about my research in different ways.

What would you say to a grad student considering doing 3MT in the future?

Strongly recommend. It will take up a decent amount of your time, but it is definitely worth it. Don’t be afraid to tackle hard scientific concepts! One thing I regret not doing more of is really trying hard to tackle quantum mechanics in my talk. The properties of quantum dots are derived from quantum mechanics and I was scared to try to explain that, and I made my explanation totally classical. I was describing electricity flowing through crystals, but I think that people were hungry to learn more about the deeper science, and I should have given it a shot, at least to practice it and see if I could do it.

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