Almost exactly 200 years ago, French physicist Sadi Carnot determined the maximum efficiency of heat engines. The Carnot ...

For two centuries, students have learned that heat flows and engines work according to rigid limits that no machine can beat.

Controlling light at dimensions thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair is one of the pillars of modern ...

Physicists are learning to treat light not as an untouchable beam that simply passes through matter, but as something that ...

MADISON – In an advance they consider a breakthrough in computational chemistry research, University of Wisconsin–Madison chemical engineers have developed model of how catalytic reactions work at the ...

A joint research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory has achieved precise control and real-time observation of ...

Nanotechnology continues its march through the field of electronics, enabling faster and more energy-efficient computer processors, larger computer memory density and increased battery capacity. These ...

A multi-disciplinary team of researchers linked atomic-scale features to efficient heat-to-electricity conversion, offering ...

MADISON – In 1959, physics icon Richard Feynman, in a characteristic back-of-the-envelope calculation, predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be contained in a cube of ...

Superconductors are materials with no electrical resistance whatsoever, commonly requiring extremely low temperatures. They are used in a wide range of domains, from medical applications to a central ...