From Engadget: Researchers use lasers to supercool semiconductor membranes, blow your mind

Whoa!! Hot laser was used to cool semiconductors?!  o.O

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Ah, lasers. Those wonderful, super intense beams of light that we’ve seen used in headlights, projectors, and naturally, death rays. Like us, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen figure there’s nothing lasers can’t do, and have figured out a way to use them to cool a bit of semiconducting material. This bit of black magic works using a membrane made of gallium arsenide and is based upon principles of quantum physics and optomechanics (the interaction between light and mechanical motion).

Turns out, when a one millimeter square membrane of gallium arsenide is placed parallel to a mirror in a vacuum chamber and bombarded with a laser beam, an optical resonator is created between them that oscillates the membrane. As the distance between the gallium arsenide and the mirror changes, so do the membrane’s oscillations. And, at a certain frequency, the membrane is cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius — despite the fact that the membrane itself is being heated by the laser. So, lasers can both heat things up andcool them down simultaneously, and if that confuses you as much as it does us, feel free to dig into the science behind this paradoxical bit of research at the source below. In other news, left is right, up is down, and Eli Manning is a beloved folk hero to all Bostonians.

 

from Engadget

From Droid Life: Web of Tech Patent Lawsuits

This needs to stop. NOW! Do you see Ford (while not the first car maker, it was first to automate the process) suing all other makers for copying its form factor of body, engine, and 4 wheels now, do you, Apple?!  Sheesh…

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It seems every other day that we hear Company A is suing Company B over patent infringement. Thanks to PCMag, we can keep track of them all through a set of infographics. These graphs give us a solid representation of the amount of firepower each company holds with their number of patents. As we can see, a lot of these companies have in the tens of thousands of patents – how they keep track of them all, don’t ask us. In the above chart, there are the major filings along with their dates, but we sort of wish they also had the outcome. We love a good Fortune 500 drama, but can’t we all just get along?

Via: PCMag

from Droid Life

From MAKE: Gorilla Glass

Reportedly, fully 20 percent—some 200 million—of the world’s mobile devices incorporate a clear cover made of Corning’s Gorilla Glass brand toughened aluminosilicate glass. Depending on the particular test used to make the determination, Gorilla Glass is seven or eight times stronger than the common soda-lime glasses used, for instance, in most windowpanes.

 

The exact formulation of Gorilla Glass is a trade secret, but Corning acknowledges that its 1960s-era Chemcor aluminosilicate glass formulation was used as a starting point. Comparing a typical Chemcor formula to that of a typical soda-lime window glass highlights a key difference: Gorilla glass includes much more aluminum oxide than “everyday” glass, and much less calcium oxide.

Gorilla Glass is cast from a hot melt using a special “fusion draw” process, aka the “overflow downdraw method” (Wikipedia), which was also invented by Corning. It improves upon the traditional float glass process (Wikipedia), which is dirtier and less precise than desirable for modern flat-panel display applications.

After Gorilla Glass is cast, it undergoes a critical chemical strengthening process consisting of a potassium nitrate bath at 400°C. Under these conditions, sodium ions in the glass surface exchange with potassium ions in the salt bath. Potassium ions are physically larger than sodium ions, and their introduction into the atomic lattice generates a layer of very strong compressive stresses at the glass surface. This “compressive armor” both resists tensile loads and helps prevent formation of scratches and other small flaws that, as in most glassy materials, are the starting points for major failures.

Corning has just announced the introduction of Gorilla Glass 2, which touts the same performance as the original Gorilla Glass formulation at 20% reduced thicknesses. If you’d like to read more, HowStuffWorks has a good general overview, and Corning’s official literature page is rich with technical detail.

 

from MAKE