Matter & Energy News -- ScienceDaily

• From defects to order: Spontaneously emerging crystal arrangements in perovskite halides
  A new hybrid layered perovskite featuring elusive spontaneous defect ordering has been found, report scientists. By introducing specific concentrations of thiocyanate ions into FAPbI3 (FA = formamidinium), they observed that ordered columnar defects appeared in the stacked crystalline layers, taking up one-third of the lattice space. These findings could pave the way to an innovative strategy for adjusting the properties of hybrid perovskites, leading to practical advances in optoelectronics and energy generation.
• Spintronics: A new path to room temperature swirling spin textures
  In some materials, spins form complex magnetic structures within the nanometer and micrometer scale in which the magnetization direction twists and curls along specific directions. Examples of such structures are magnetic bubbles, skyrmions, and magnetic vortices. Spintronics aims to make use of such tiny magnetic structures to store data or perform logic operations with very low power consumption, compared to today's dominant microelectronic components. However, the generation and stabilization of most of these magnetic textures is restricted to a few materials and achievable under very specific conditions (temperature, magnetic field...). Physicists have now investigated a new approach that can be used to create and stabilize complex spin textures, such as radial vortices, in a variety of compounds.