In a move that would make the Alchemists of King Arthur’s
time green with envy, scientists have unraveled the formula for turning liquid
cement into liquid metal. This makes cement a semi-conductor and opens up its
use in the profitable consumer electronics marketplace for thin films,
protective coatings, and computer chips.
“This new material has lots of applications, including as
thin-film resistors used in liquid-crystal displays, basically the flat panel
computer monitor that you are probably reading this from at the moment,” said
Chris Benmore, a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne
National Laboratory who worked with a team of scientists from Japan, Finland
and Germany to take the “magic” out of the cement-to-metal transformation.
Benmore and Shinji Kohara from Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research
Institute/SPring-8 led the research effort.