An international team of physicists has shown that an extremely short pulse of light can be used to convert an insulator into a metal, allowing an electrical current to be switched on and off for ...

Scientists have created a process to make patterns in atom-thick layers that combine a conductor -- graphene -- and an insulator -- hexagonal ... the only real limits are those defined by modern ...

The electronic energy states allowed by quantum mechanics determine whether a solid is an insulator or whether ... Dirac points is responsible for the electrical and thermal conductivities of ...

University of Cambridge researchers have discovered that a material already known for its peculiar electrical properties appears to behave as both a conductor and an insulator at the same time.

It hardly conducts any electricity at all, so we can say it’s an electrical insulator. Inside the plastic, all the electrons are tightly bound to the atoms, so the charges cannot move very far ...

When polyethylene insulators are used ... system and them convert it to a bare system? The real tragedy was an unforeseen one, however, as the junction point between the covered and the bare (stripped ...

Researchers are optimistic that the next era of technological advancements will start with the development of novel information-processing materials and technologies that combine electrical ...

Conductors, semiconductors and insulators are differentiated by their band gap, which essentially measures how much energy electrons need to move freely through the material. So in a conductor ...

Cambridge researchers have identified a material that behaves as both a conductor and an insulator. The material, samarium hexaboride (SmB6), acts like an insulator in certain measurements, but ...

researchers have created a “topological crystalline insulator,” whose bulk acts as an insulator but whose surface conducts electrical currents through a process that is related to the coupling between ...

Some materials that are inherently disordered display unusual conductivity, sometimes behaving like insulators and sometimes like conductors. Physicists have now analysed the conductivity in a ...