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There’s a lion’s share of potential energy in the vibrations produced by footsteps on dance floors, exercise machines in the gym, or the engines of cars, planes or construction equipment. Some tech companies have already begun to harvest electricity from waste vibrations to power lights and recharge batteries using a class of piezoelectric ceramic materials, which emit electrical charges when stepped on or manipulated.

Penn State’s research enterprise reached a new milestone in fiscal year 2024-25 with $1.44 billion in total research expenditures, the largest in the University’s history. The amount — which is an 8% increase, or $110 million, over the previous year — reflects the combined external and internal investments in critical research areas, such as artificial intelligence, national defense, energy resilience, agriculture and public health.

Clive Randall, Evan Pugh University Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected as a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. The academy is an international scientific organization composed of the world’s leading scientists, scholars and engineers, dedicated to promoting excellence in science and technology.

A new twist on a classic material could advance quantum computing and make modern data centers more energy efficient, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State.

Materials scientists can learn a lot about a sample material by shooting lasers at it. With nonlinear optical microscopy — a specialized imaging technique that looks for a change in the color of intense laser light — researchers can collect data on how the light interacts with the sample and, through time-consuming and sometimes expensive analyses, characterize the material’s structure and other properties. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed a computational framework that can interpret the nonlinear optical microscopy images to characterize the material in microscopic detail.

Paul J. Simmonds, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University, will present “Tensile-strained self-assembly: Nanoscale stretching for novel quantum light sources” as part of the Penn State Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s (MatSE) 590 seminar series. The talk will be held from 3:05 to 4:20 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23, in 112 Kern Building on the University Park campus.

Sometimes, less really is more. By removing oxygen during synthesis, a team led by materials scientists at Penn State created seven new high-entropy oxides, or HEOs: a class of ceramics composed of five or more metals with potential for applications in energy storage, electronics and protective coatings.