Materials science and engineering Archives

July 5, 2025

Robotic probe quickly measures key properties of new materials

Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties.

A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up.

Their system utilizes a robotic probe to measure an important electrical property known as photoconductance, which is how electrically responsive a material is to the presence of light.

The researchers inject materials-science-domain knowledge from human experts into the machine-learning model that guides the robot’s decision making. This enables the robot to identify the best places to contact a material with the probe to gain the most information about its photoconductance, while a specialized planning procedure finds the fastest way to move between contact points.

During a 24-hour test, the fully autonomous robotic probe took more than 125 unique measurements per hour,

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June 25, 2025

Four from MIT named 2025 Goldwater Scholars

Four MIT rising seniors have been selected to receive a 2025 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, including Avani Ahuja and Jacqueline Prawira in the School of Engineering and Julianna Lian and Alex Tang from the School of Science. An estimated 5,000 college sophomores and juniors from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, of whom only 441 were selected.

The Goldwater Scholarships have been conferred since 1989 by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. These scholarships have supported undergraduates who go on to become leading scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in their respective fields.

Avani Ahuja, a mechanical engineering and electrical engineering major, conducts research in the Conformable Decoders group, where she is focused on developing a “wearable conformable breast ultrasound patch” that makes ultrasounds for breast cancer more accessible.

“Doing research in the Media Lab has had a huge impact on me,

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June 18, 2025

New 3D chips could make electronics faster and more energy-efficient

The advanced semiconductor material gallium nitride will likely be key for the next generation of high-speed communication systems and the power electronics needed for state-of-the-art data centers.

Unfortunately, the high cost of gallium nitride (GaN) and the specialization required to incorporate this semiconductor material into conventional electronics have limited its use in commercial applications.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new fabrication process that integrates high-performance GaN transistors onto standard silicon CMOS chips in a way that is low-cost and scalable, and compatible with existing semiconductor foundries.

Their method involves building many tiny transistors on the surface of a GaN chip, cutting out each individual transistor, and then bonding just the necessary number of transistors onto a silicon chip using a low-temperature process that preserves the functionality of both materials.

The cost remains minimal since only a tiny amount of GaN material is added to the chip,

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June 3, 2025

AI stirs up the recipe for concrete in MIT study

For weeks, the whiteboard in the lab was crowded with scribbles, diagrams, and chemical formulas. A research team across the Olivetti Group and the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) was working intensely on a key problem: How can we reduce the amount of cement in concrete to save on costs and emissions?

The question was certainly not new; materials like fly ash, a byproduct of coal production, and slag, a byproduct of steelmaking, have long been used to replace some of the cement in concrete mixes. However, the demand for these products is outpacing supply as industry looks to reduce its climate impacts by expanding their use, making the search for alternatives urgent. The challenge that the team discovered wasn’t a lack of candidates; the problem was that there were too many to sort through.

On May 17, the team, led by postdoc Soroush Mahjoubi, published an open-access paper in Nature’s Communications Materials outlining their solution.

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May 31, 2025

New fuel cell could enable electric aviation

Batteries are nearing their limits in terms of how much power they can store for a given weight. That’s a serious obstacle for energy innovation and the search for new ways to power airplanes, trains, and ships. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a solution that could help electrify these transportation systems.

Instead of a battery, the new concept is a kind of fuel cell — which is similar to a battery but can be quickly refueled rather than recharged. In this case, the fuel is liquid sodium metal, an inexpensive and widely available commodity. The other side of the cell is just ordinary air, which serves as a source of oxygen atoms. In between, a layer of solid ceramic material serves as the electrolyte, allowing sodium ions to pass freely through, and a porous air-facing electrode helps the sodium to chemically react with oxygen and produce electricity.

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May 26, 2025

MIT physicists discover a new type of superconductor that’s also a magnet

Magnets and superconductors go together like oil and water — or so scientists have thought. But a new finding by MIT physicists is challenging this century-old assumption.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the physicists report that they have discovered a “chiral superconductor” — a material that conducts electricity without resistance, and also, paradoxically, is intrinsically magnetic. What’s more, they observed this exotic superconductivity in a surprisingly ordinary material: graphite, the primary material in pencil lead.

Graphite is made from many layers of graphene — atomically thin, lattice-like sheets of carbon atoms — that are stacked together and can easily flake off when pressure is applied, as when pressing down to write on a piece of paper. A single flake of graphite can contain several million sheets of graphene, which are normally stacked such that every other layer aligns.

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April 28, 2025

New electronic “skin” could enable lightweight night-vision glasses

MIT engineers have developed a technique to grow and peel ultrathin “skins” of electronic material. The method could pave the way for new classes of electronic devices, such as ultrathin wearable sensors, flexible transistors and computing elements, and highly sensitive and compact imaging devices.

As a demonstration, the team fabricated a thin membrane of pyroelectric material — a class of heat-sensing material that produces an electric current in response to changes in temperature. The thinner the pyroelectric material, the better it is at sensing subtle thermal variations.

With their new method, the team fabricated the thinnest pyroelectric membrane yet, measuring 10 nanometers thick, and demonstrated that the film is highly sensitive to heat and radiation across the far-infrared spectrum.

The newly developed film could enable lighter, more portable, and highly accurate far-infrared (IR) sensing devices, with potential applications for night-vision eyewear and autonomous driving in foggy conditions.

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April 23, 2025

MIT engineers print synthetic “metamaterials” that are both strong and stretchy

In metamaterials design, the name of the game has long been “stronger is better.”

Metamaterials are synthetic materials with microscopic structures that give the overall material exceptional properties. A huge focus has been in designing metamaterials that are stronger and stiffer than their conventional counterparts. But there’s a trade-off: The stiffer a material, the less flexible it is.

MIT engineers have now found a way to fabricate a metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy. The base material is typically highly rigid and brittle, but it is printed in precise, intricate patterns that form a structure that is both strong and flexible.

The key to the new material’s dual properties is a combination of stiff microscopic struts and a softer woven architecture. This microscopic “double network,” which is printed using a plexiglass-like polymer, produced a material that could stretch over four times its size without fully breaking.

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