Engineering was in Domitilla Del Vecchio’s blood from the very beginning: Growing up in Rome as the daughter of an engineer, she spent long hours of her childhood tinkering and playing in her father’s home laboratory and exploring the various bits of electronics and lab equipment he would bring home. “He had a lab at…

Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years: They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a much greater driving range. But bringing that promise to reality has faced a number of challenges, including the need to develop better, more…

MIT researchers mixed photons from an intense laser pulse with an exotic surface electrons on a topological insulator. Their high-speed camera captured snapshots of the exotic state, from its generation to its rapid disappearance, a process lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds. They also found there were different kinds of mixed states when the polarization…

MIT team documents a never-before-seen coupling of photons with electrons on the surface of an exotic crystal. Researchers at MIT have succeeded in producing and measuring a coupling of photons and electrons on the surface of an unusual type of material called a topological insulator. This type of coupling had been predicted by theorists, but…