Highly Efficient CO/CH Separation by Porous Graphene via Quadrupole Gating Mechanism.

Acetylene (CH) is an important and widely used raw material in various industries (such as petrochemical). Generally, a product yield is proportional to the purity of CH; however, CH from a typical industrial gas-production process is commonly contaminated by CO. So far, the achievement of high-purity CH separated from a CO/CH mixture is still challenging due to their very close molecular dimensions and boiling temperatures.

Dense cloud cores revealed by CO in the low metallicity dwarf galaxy WLM.

Understanding stellar birth requires observations of the clouds in which they form. These clouds are dense and self-gravitating, and in all existing observations they are molecular, with H2 the dominant species and carbon monoxide (CO) the best available tracer. When the abundances of carbon and oxygen are low compared with that of hydrogen, and the opacity from dust is also low, as in primeval galaxies and local dwarf irregular galaxies, CO forms slowly and is easily destroyed, so it is difficult for it to accumulate inside dense clouds.

Carbon monoxide in clouds at low metallicity in the dwarf irregular galaxy WLM.

Carbon monoxide (CO) is the primary tracer for interstellar clouds where stars form, but it has never been detected in galaxies in which the oxygen abundance relative to hydrogen is less than 20 per cent of that of the Sun, even though such 'low-metallicity' galaxies often form stars. This raises the question of whether stars can form in dense gas without molecules, cooling to the required near-zero temperatures by atomic transitions and dust radiation rather than by molecular line emission; and it highlights uncertainties about star formation in the early Universe, when the metallicity was generally low. Here we report the detection of CO in two regions of a local dwarf irregular galaxy, WLM, where the metallicity is 13 per cent of the solar value.

High response piezoelectric and piezoresistive materials for fast, low voltage switching: simulation and theory of transduction physics at the nanometer-scale.

Field effect transistors are reaching the limits imposed by the scaling of materials and the electrostatic gating physics underlying the device. In this Communication, a new type of switch based on different physics, which combines known piezoelectric and piezoresistive materials, is described and is shown by theory and simulation to achieve gigahertz digital switching at low voltage (0.1 V).

Evidence for electronic gap-driven metal-semiconductor transition in phase-change materials.

Phase-change materials are functionally important materials that can be thermally interconverted between metallic (crystalline) and semiconducting (amorphous) phases on a very short time scale. Although the interconversion appears to involve a change in local atomic coordination numbers, the electronic basis for this process is still unclear. Here, we demonstrate that in a nearly vacancy-free binary GeSb system where we can drive the phase change both thermally and, as we discover, by pressure, the transformation into the amorphous phase is electronic in origin.