New research offers clearer insight into how phase transitions unfold at the atomic scale in real materials. When ice turns into water, the change happens almost instantly. Once the melting ...

For more than a century, schoolbook physics has divided matter into neat categories like solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. A ...

Isotactic polybutene-1 exhibits intriguing polymorphism, transitioning from a metastable tetragonal phase (Form II) to a more stable trigonal phase (Form I) through solid–solid transformations. These ...

Physicists have taken a gemstone better known for engagement rings and turned it into a laboratory for one of the strangest ...

The new method can determine crystal structures underlying experimental data thus far difficult to analyze. A joint research team led by Yuuki Kubo and Shiji Tsuneyuki of the University of Tokyo has ...

Research led by Professor Philip C. Y. Chow and his PhD student Ms. Yumeng Song from the Department of Mechanical Engineering under the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has ...

Researchers have devised a mathematical approach to predict the structures of crystals -- a critical step in developing many medicines and electronic devices -- in a matter of hours using only a ...

For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. This technique works best when the ...

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Metalworkers and metallurgists have long appreciated the ability to tailor the performance characteristics of steel (an alloy of iron and carbon), including their strength, hardness, ductility and ...