The aim of the research that is presented in this paper was to evaluate the physical and mechanical properties of heat-insulating mortars with expanded cork aggregates and different binders. In this work, the measurements of surface roughness and adhesion strength, supported by determination of basic mechanical and physical parameters, such as density, bulk density, open porosity, total porosit...

Topological insulators are a new class of quantum materials with metallic (edge) surface states and insulating bulk states. They demonstrate a variety of novel electronic and optical properties, which make them highly promising electronic, spintronic, and optoelectronic materials. We report on a novel conic plasmonic nanostructure that is made of bulk-insulating topological insulators and has a...

A new hybrid approach consists to use the advantages of both systems namely the high geometric aspects of the electrodes of the ultracapacitor and the high dielectric strength of polymer materials used in dielectric capacitors. The surface roughness of the electrodes of the ultracapacitor is manufactured with nano-porous materials; activated carbon and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Many compositions...

We review our recent measurements of the complex AC conductivity of thin InOx films studied as a function of magnetic field through the nominal 2D superconductor-insulator transition. These measurements the first of their type to probe nonzero frequency reveals a significant finite frequency superfluid stiffness well into the insulating regime. Unlike conventional fluctuation superconductivity ...

Reports of metallic behavior in two-dimensional (2D) systems such as high mobility metal-oxide field effect transistors, insulating oxide interfaces, graphene, and MoS2 have challenged the well-known prediction of Abrahams, et al. that all 2D systems must be insulating. The existence of a metallic state for such a wide range of 2D systems thus reveals a wide gap in our understanding of 2D trans...

The use of mai l amplitude tipposition modulation (TPM) in combination with lock-in detection of the modulated current signal greatly improves the sendtivity and image resolution of the scanning electrochemical microscope and provides a method of distinguishing between conductive and insulating areas on the substrate surface being examined. The experimental in-phase current versus distance beha...

Nowadays, the most widely used insulating materials in high voltage equipment such as cables are polymeric insulations due to the numerous merits they possess with regards to electrical performance compared to paper insulations. However, electrical treeing, one of the dielectric pre-breakdown phenomena, has been considered as a major contribution to the failure of insulating polymeric materials...

Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) is an insulating compound that is structurally similar to graphite. Like graphene, single sheets of BN are atomically flat, and they are of current interest in few-layer hybrid devices, such as transistors and capacitors, that contain insulating components. While graphite and other layered compounds can be intercalated by redox reactions and then converted chemica...

We report direct experimental evidence that the insulating phase of a disordered, yet strongly interacting two-dimensional electron system becomes unstable at low temperatures. As the temperature decreases, a transition from insulating to metal-like transport behavior is observed, which persists even when the resistivity of the system greatly exceeds the quantum of resistivity h/e2. The results...

The newly synthesized strontium doped $R{\mathrm{NiO}}_{2}$ ($R$=Nd, Pr, and La) superconductors have stimulated extensive interests in understanding their pairing mechanism nature. Here we study the this family from a two-orbital model comprising Ni- $3{d}_{{x}^{2}\ensuremath{-}{y}^{2}}$ $3{d}_{xy}$ orbitals, equipped with extended Hubbard interactions induced low-energy effective superexchang...