Nanotechnology Spotlight – Latest Articles

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Showing Spotlights 81 - 88 of 154 in category All (newest first):

 

Photorealistic plasmonic printing with aluminum nanostructures

plasmonic_nanosctructuresAluminum has gained interest in the field of nanoplasmonics not only because it is abundant and costs a fraction of gold or silver, but also because it allows field-enhancement effects into the ultraviolet. However, it has broader resonances than silver and gold, and forms an oxide layer. Both these effects are undesirable in applications such as biosensing, in which signal strengths are reduced in the presence of resistive losses and oxide barriers. However, color printing based on the plasmon resonances of aluminum nanostructures could benefit from these properties. Researchers have now demonstrated, for the first time, the utility of aluminum nanostructures for ultrahigh definition plasmonic color printing.

Jul 15th, 2014

Spraying light - the fabrication of light-emitting 3D objects

forkThe light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC) shares several external attributes with the OLED, notably the opportunity for soft areal emission from thin-film devices, but its unique electrochemical operation eliminates the principal requirement on inert-atmosphere/vacuum processing as it can comprise solely air-stabile materials. This important intrinsic advantage has inspired recent work on an ambient-air fabrication of LEC devices using scalable means. Introducing a new, purpose-designed spray-sintering deposition technique, researchers have now shown that it is possible to spray out liquid inks onto essentially any surface for the achievement of light emission.

Jun 2nd, 2014

Topological insulator - a novel optical and microwave-absorbing material

topological_insulatorRecently, a new Dirac material - a lattice system where the excitations are described by relativistic Dirac or Weyl equations - namely a topological insulator (TI), entered researchers' sight. TIs possess a small band gap in their bulk state and a gapless metallic state at their edge/surface. A research group working on two-dimensional materials photonicshas now experimentally demonstrated for the first time that TI may be a novel microwave-absorbing material.

Apr 15th, 2014

Microsphere nanoscope enables super-resolution biological microscopy

microsphere_nanoscopeA conventional optical microscope equipped with an oil immersion objective can resolve objects no smaller than about 200 nanometers - a restriction known as the diffraction limit. The diffraction limit, which typically is half the width of the wavelength of light being used to view the specimen, represents the fundamental limit of optical imaging resolution. Breaking this limit is possible by very sophisticated techniques and costly instrumentation. Now, though, researchers in Switzerland have found that when putting a transparent dielectric particle on top of an object with nanoscale features, details of that object with a size as small as one fourth of the diffraction limit can be resolved using a conventional microscope objective.

Jan 7th, 2014

Plasmonic heating can change the biological fate of nanoparticles

plasmonicsFollowing extensive research in the field of bionano-interfaces, it is now well understood that the primary interaction of biological species with nanoparticles is strongly dependent to the long-lived protein corona, i.e. a strongly adsorbed protein layer at the surface of nanoparticles. The amount, composition, and exposure site of the associated proteins in the long-lived protein corona can define the biological response to the nanoparticles and hence reveal their biological fate. Scientists have now shown that laser plasmonic heat induction leads to significant changes in the protein corona composition at the surface of gold nanorods.

Dec 18th, 2013

A new type of optical sensing device based on artificial metamaterials

metamaterialOver the past decade, electromagnetic metamaterials have become an extremely active field of research in both the physics and the engineering communities. Metamaterials gain their properties from their structure rather than directly from their composition and show the peculiarity of having an index of refraction at optical frequencies from negative to very high positive values. Researchers have now suggested a new type of optical sensing device based on artificial metamaterials with topological darkness.

Nov 26th, 2013

Graphene controls color of nano-sandwiches

gold_nanosandwichTechnology in our lives is ever more based on miniaturized structures that deliver higher performance devices taking up a fraction of the space compared to several years ago. But seeing what is going on at these tiny length scales comparable to molecules is very hard. Normally light cannot be used since it is not focused tightly enough, limited by the optical wavelength which is much larger than the structures we want to observe. New research suggests that tightly squeezing light into small gaps in metallic nanostructures now provides a way to circumvent this problem.

Oct 22nd, 2013

Plasmonic nanocircuits enable optics on a microchip

plasmonic_nanocircuitA team of researchers in Germany and the U.S. demonstrates that it is possible to operate extremely compact optical circuits on the nanoscale, a size scale that makes it compatible and potentially competitive with state-of-the-art electronic microchips, while substantially reducing the limiting factor of heating loss and while strongly increasing the efficiency to funnel infrared laser light into these circuits with a novel design of optical nanoantennas.

Sep 13th, 2013