Critical & Emerging Technologies

In quantum mechanics, spin is an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles. Spintronics is “A branch of physics concerned with the storage and transfer of information by means of electron spins in addition to electron charge as in conventional electronics.” Spin-based electronics focuses on devices whose functionality …

Nanomaterials  are often categorized  based on number of dimensions of a material, which are outside the nanoscale (<100 nm) range. Accordingly, in  one-dimensional nanomaterials (1D), one dimension is outside the nanoscale. This class includes  nanofibers, nanotubes, nanorods, and nanowires. 1D materials are generally considered to be high‐capacity and stable electrode materials, due …

In April 2001, a US Navy surveillance plane was intercepted by two Chinese F-8 fighter planes during a routine patrol flight over the Chinese South Sea. The US plane was forced to make an emergency landing in China, after what officials described as a “minor” midair collision, occurred with one of the Chinese planes. The US …

Finding new materials has traditionally been guided by intuition and trial and error,” said Turab Lookman, a physicist and materials scientist in the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “But with increasing chemical complexity, the combination possibilities become too large for trial-and-error approaches …

Modern expeditionary military missions generate and exchange massive amounts of data that are used to produce situational awareness and guide decision-making. Much of the data must travel long distances along backbone communications networks composed of high-capacity links that connect command centers.   Fiber optic cables provide the core backbone for …

The Department of Defense (DoD) maintains information systems that depend on Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, Government off-the-shelf (GOTS) software, and Free and opensource (FOSS) software. Securing this diverse technology base requires highly skilled hackers who reason about the functionality of software and identify novel vulnerabilities. This process requires hundreds or thousands of hours of …

The vision for the future soldier is to be combat effective and also highly mobile, adaptive, networked, sustainable with total battle space situation awareness and information assurance. Therefore, he is equipped with night- vision goggles, radios, smartphones, GPS, infrared sights, a laptop as well as batteries to power them. All …

What do a flea and an eagle have in common? They can store energy in their feet without having to continuously contract their muscles to then jump high or hold on to prey. Now scientists Now scientists at Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge have created materials that …