The foremost atom of the tip in a scanning probe microscope is critically important for precise imaging results. In atomic force microscopy, the front atom significantly affects atomic-scale contrast and atom manipulation. The chemical species is a dominant factor in determining the tip state, and in situ chemical identification of a tip apex remains a challenging task. Researchers found that Pauling's equation is applicable...
Feb 21, 2020
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Two-dimensional (2D) materials could offer new building blocks for future technologies, but this requires approaches to control the carrier type in 2D semiconductors. A number of pioneering works have demonstrated different methods to program the carrier type in 2D materials, such as electrostatic doping, chemical doping, ion implantation, charge transfer, and annealing control. Recently, a team of researchers have developed...
Feb 20, 2020
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Similar to the way painters mix different hues and tones of colors on their palette, researchers demonstrated a method for continuous mixing of different structural colors at the nanoscale on a single pixel. This novel method for structurally generating and mixing vivid colors additively is based on interleaved rectangular lattices of metallic nanoparticles. This coloring approach offers a large individual control over the...
Feb 18, 2020
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Hematite as a magnetic photocatalyst can support the production of oxygen in its magnetic ground state and thereby improve the efficiency of hydrogen production. When hematite is made thinner, another important improvement in the efficiency of the reaction could be accomplished by expectedly more efficient separation of charge carriers upon the absorption of light on the surface. Scientists now elucidate exactly how optical...
Feb 14, 2020
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Oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), oxygen evolution reaction (OER), and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) are among the core electrochemical processes in clean energy conversion and storage devices, such as metal-air batteries, water electrolyzers, and fuel cells. Single-atom catalysts have emerged as a new frontier of heterogeneous catalysts for these reactions due to their highly increased coverage of active sites, enhanced...
Feb 13, 2020
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Organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites have emerged as a promising optoelectronic material with exceptional structure and property tunability. This new generation of functional materials possess excellent properties such as large optical absorption, long carrier diffusion length, high carrier mobility, and low-cost solution production process. Fabrication methods based on inkjet printing emerged for patterning such perovskite...
Feb 11, 2020
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New types of magnetic nanostructures have interesting properties that enhance novel medical applications in diagnosis and allow the exploration of new therapeutic techniques. In a new paper, researchers review promising new nanomaterials that can be used in cancer diagnosis and treatment, namely as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents. One especially interesting advance involves exotic spin configurations, like...
Feb 06, 2020
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Proteins present in human plasma mirror a person's physiology and the ability to rapidly profile the plasma proteome holds the promise of a revolution in point-of-care disease diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring. New research findings suggest that levitation patterns of human plasma proteins using a magnetic levitation technique may provide useful information about the health spectrum of individual donors. The study reveals...
Feb 03, 2020
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Researchers explain how a higher order periodic modulations due to the encapsulation of graphene between hexagonal boron nitride, called supermoire, affects the electronic and structural properties of graphene, as revealed in three recent independent experiments. High quality graphene samples are of high importance for obtaining and exploiting its theoretically described properties. Utilizing an adequate substrate reduces...
Jan 29, 2020
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