Silver Halide is the most common holographic material currently used by everyone from hobbyists to professional scientists. This is because of its high sensitivity and the fact that it’s easily available commercially. Silver Halide is a salt of Silver and a Halide, which are a group of elements that include Fluorine, Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine, which are light sensitive. The first, accidental...

In this topical review we discuss recent advances in the use of physical insight into the way biological materials function, to design novel engineered materials 'from scratch', or from the level of fundamental building blocks upwards and by using computational multiscale methods that link chemistry to material function. We present studies that connect advances in multiscale hierarchical materi...

Diffraction describes the perturbation of the propagation of wave motion when the wave encounters an object with different properties from the medium in which the wave is normally propagating. It is a subset of the more general phenomenon of scattering, for example the scattering of accelerated subatomic particles by nuclei that is explored by nuclear physicists or the scattering of visible lig...

Carbon-based structures are the most versatile materials used in the modern field of renewable energy (i.e., in both generation and storage) and environmental science (e.g., purification/remediation). However, there is a need and indeed a desire to develop increasingly more sustainable variants of classical carbon materials (e.g., activated carbons, carbon nanotubes, carbon aerogels, etc.), par...

Nuclear power remains a contentious issue for many. Its proponents point towards it being a cost-competitive, feasible route for meeting our ever growing appetite for energy, with relatively low greenhouse gas emissions (Nature Mater. 7, 679; 2008). Those against a nuclear-led energy policy cite concerns over the devastating impact a nuclear incident can have, as well as the complex scientific ...

We examine the theory of micromagnetics developed by W. F. Brown. We show that in the case often considered, with exchange energy omitted, the minimum of the free energy is not attained for uniaxial materials but is attained for cubic materials. A study of the minimizing sequences reveals that these accurately model many features of observed domain structure. Finally, we reexamine the so-called...