Nanotechnology Spotlight – Latest Articles

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Showing Spotlights 113 - 120 of 328 in category All (newest first):

 

A graphene NEMS switch to protect against electrostatic discharging

suspended_grapheneOne of the most pervasive reliability problems facing the computer chip industry is ESD (electrostatic discharging) failure caused by the rapid, spontaneous transfer of electrostatic charge induced by a high electrostatic field. A novel above-IC graphene based nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) switch structure for on-chip ESD protection utilizes the unique properties of graphene. This switch is a two-terminal device with a vacuum gap between a conducting substrate at the bottom and a suspended graphene membrane on top serving as the discharging path.

Dec 4th, 2018

Whispers about graphene's electrical properties

whispering-galleryScientists report the experimental results of studying the response characteristics in a millimeter wave band whispering gallery mode sapphire resonator to single-layer graphene at different distances of graphene from the resonator. They found that the evanescent field of the resonance system is extremely sensitive to the environment, surrounding materials and disk coatings. A series of experiments showed that such whispering gallery mode resonance can be used to detect the conductivity and thickness of the materials deposited on top and/or can even be used for advanced biosensing.

Nov 21st, 2018

Beta-lead oxide quantum dots

2D-materialIn recent years, black-phosphorus-analogue (BPA) two-dimensional materials have been demonstrated to exhibit promising optoelectronic performances and distinguished ambient stabilities, holding great promise in practical applications. In new work, researchers demonstrated that ultra-small 2D beta-lead oxide quantum dots showed fast carrier dynamics and significantly high photocurrent density and excellent ambient stability. These findings hold great potential for high-performance BPA-based optoelectronic devices.

Nov 6th, 2018

High-loading graphene composites meet electronic industry's metrics for thermal conductivity enhancement

graphene_fillersResearchers investigated the thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity of epoxy composites with high loading fractions of graphene and h-BN fillers. They found that the graphene fillers outperformed boron nitride fillers in terms of thermal conductivity enhancement. The surprising finding is that, in the high loading composites with quasi-2D fillers, the apparent cross-plane thermal conductivity of the fillers can be the limiting factor for heat conduction. These results are important for developing the next generation of the thermal interface materials.

Oct 30th, 2018

Tri-layer silicene may beat bulk GaAs as high-efficiency photovoltaic absorber

siliceneIn the past few years, monolayer and multilayer silicenes have been successfully grown on various metal substrates. Unfortunately, silicene on metal substrate generally exhibits metallic or semi-metallic character without a bandgap, and thus cannot be used as adsorption layer of photovoltaic materials. A new comprehensive investigation of multilayer silicene by means of ab initio swarm-intelligence structure-searching method predicts that tri-layer silicene is an ideal candidate for high-efficiency photovoltaic absorbers.

Oct 15th, 2018

Beware the fake graphene

grapheneA new study on worldwide graphene production shows unequivocally that the quality of the graphene produced in the world today is rather poor, not optimal for most applications, and most companies are producing graphite microplatelets. This is possibly the main reason for the slow development of graphene applications, which usually require a customized solution in terms of graphene properties. A conclusion that sounds even more damming is that this extensive study of graphene production worldwide indicates that there is almost no high quality graphene, as defined by ISO, in the market yet.

Oct 9th, 2018

2D material produces highest ever signals for human embryonic stem cell detection

stem-cellsResearchers have developed a way to achieve an ultra-high bioelectric signal from human embryonic stem cells using direct current-voltage measurements facilitated by few-layered 2D molybdenum disulfide sheets. This method, which produces cell signals 2 orders of magnitude higher than previous electrical-based detection methods, paves the way for the development of a broadly applicable, fast, and damage-free stem cell detection method capable of identifying pluripotency with virtually any complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor circuits.

Sep 17th, 2018

The rise of phosphorene analogue optoelectronic materials

phosphoreneBlack phosphorus (BP or phosphorene), a novel two-dimensional semiconducting material, has gained tremendous attention because of its intriguing properties, such as ON/OFF ratio, high carrier mobility, and tunable direct band. However, a fundamental obstacle hindering practical applications is the lack of stability under ambient conditions. Now researchers demonstrated both excellent photoelectrochemical performance and significantly improved stability based on tin monosulfide nanosheets. These findings hold great potential for practical applications of phosphorene analogue nanomaterials-based devices.

Sep 13th, 2018