Nanotechnology News and Discussions

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Chemists create nanomachines by breaking them apart
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-chemists- ... hines.html
by University of Montreal
"Every act of creation," Picasso famously noted, "is first an act of destruction."

Taking this concept literally, researchers in Canada have now discovered that "breaking" molecular nanomachines basic to life can create new ones that work even better.

Their findings are published today in Nature Chemistry.
Evolved over millions of years
Life on Earth is made possible by tens of thousands of nanomachines that have evolved over millions of years. Often made of proteins or nucleic acids, they typically contain thousands of atoms and are less than 10,000 times the size of a human hair.

"These nanomachines control all molecular activities in our body, and problems with their regulation or structure are at the origin of most human diseases," said the new study's principal investigator Alexis Vallée-Bélisle, a chemistry professor at Université de Montréal.

Studying the way these nanomachines are built, Vallée-Bélisle, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Bioengineering and Bio-Nanotechnology, noticed that while some are made using a single component or part (often long biopolymers), others use several components that spontaneously assemble.

"Since most of my students spend their lives creating nanomachines, we started to wonder if it is more beneficial to create them using one or more self-assembling molecular components," said Vallée-Bélisle.
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Make them thin enough, and antiferroelectric materials become ferroelectric
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-thin-anti ... ctric.html
by Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University
Antiferroelectric materials have electrical properties that make them advantageous for use in high-density energy storage applications. Researchers have now discovered a size threshold beyond which antiferroelectrics lose those properties, becoming ferroelectric.

"Electronic devices are getting smaller and smaller, which makes it increasingly important for us to understand how a material's properties may change at small scales," says Ruijuan Xu, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University.
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Scientists develop graphene aerogel particles for efficient water purification
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-scientist ... cient.html
by University of Manchester
Writing in the Journal of Molecular Liquids, a team led by Professor Aravind Vijayaraghavan based in the National Graphene Institute (NGI) have produced three-dimensional particles made of graphene, of many interesting shapes, using a variation of the vortex ring effect. The same effect is used to produce smoke rings and is responsible for keeping dandelion seeds flying. These particles have also been shown to be exceptionally efficient in adsorbing contaminants from water, thereby purifying it.

The researchers have shown that the formation of these graphene particles is governed by a complex interplay between different forces such as viscosity, surface tension, inertia and electrostatics. Prof Vijayaraghavan said, "We have undertaken a systematic study to understand and explain the influence of various parameters and forces involved in the particle formation. Then, by tailoring this process, we have developed very efficient particles for adsorptive purification of contaminants from water."

Graphene oxide (GO), a functionalized form of graphene that forms a stable dispersion in water, has many unique properties, including being a liquid crystal. Individual GO sheets are one atom thin, and as wide as the thickness of human hair. However, to be useful, they need to be assembled into complex 3-dimensional shapes that preserves their high surface area and surface chemistry. Such porous 3-dimensional assemblies of GO are called aerogels, and when filled with water, they are called hydrogels.
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Researchers develop novel nonwovens that are electrically conductive but thermally insulating

by Bayreuth University
Researchers at the University of Bayreuth present novel electrospun nonwovens in Science Advances that exhibit an unusual combination of high electrical conductivity and extremely low thermal conductivity.

The nonwovens represent a breakthrough in materials research: it has been possible to decouple electrical and thermal conductivity based on a simple-to-implement material concept. The nonwovens are made of carbon and silicon-based ceramic via electrospinning process and are attractive for technological applications, for example, in energy technology and electronics. They can be manufactured and processed cost-effectively on an industrial scale.
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-nonwovens ... ating.html
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Revolutionary Phase Change Nano Inks: The Future of Energy-Efficient Climate Control in Buildings & Cars
https://scitechdaily.com/revolutionary- ... ings-cars/

By University of Melbourne April 5, 2023
Phase Change Inks
Phase change inks using nanotechnology have been developed to control temperature and provide passive climate control, reducing energy consumption. The versatile inks have potential applications in buildings, electronics, and clothing, and could become a sustainable solution to address climate change.

World-first ‘phase change inks’ that could transform how we heat and cool buildings, homes, and cars – to achieve sophisticated ‘passive climate’ control – have been developed, with enormous potential to help reduce energy use and global greenhouse gas emissions.

New research published in The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Materials Chemistry A led by Dr. Mohammad Taha, documents proof-of-concept ‘phase change inks’ that use nanotechnology to control the temperature in everyday environments. They achieve this by adjusting the amount of radiation that can pass through them, based on the surrounding environment.

Dr. Taha said these inks could be used to develop coatings to achieve passive heating and cooling, reducing our need to rely on energy creation to regulate temperatures.

“Humans use a lot of energy to create and maintain comfortable environments – heating and cooling our buildings, homes, cars, and even our bodies,” Dr. Taha said.

“We can no longer only focus on energy generation from renewable resources to reduce our environmental impact. We also need to consider reducing our energy consumption as part of our proposed energy solutions, as the impacts of climate change become a reality.

“By engineering our inks to respond to their surroundings, we not only reduce the energy expenditure, but we also remove the need for auxiliary control systems to control temperatures, which is an additional energy waste.”

Passive climate control would enable comfortable living conditions without expending energy unnecessarily. For example, to provide comfortable heating in winter, the inks applied on a building façade could automatically transform to allow greater sun radiation to pass through during the day, and greater insulation to keep warmth in at night. In summer, they could transform to form a barrier to block heat radiation from the sun and the surrounding environment.

The versatile ‘phase change inks’ are a proof-of-concept that can be laminated, sprayed or added to paints and building materials. They could also be incorporated into clothing, regulating body temperature in extreme environments, or in the creation of large-scale, flexible and wearable electronic devices like bendable circuits, cameras and detectors, and gas and temperature sensors.
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Team develops the world's smallest and fastest nano-excitonic transistor

by Pohang University of Science and Technology
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-team-worl ... tonic.html
How can Marvel movie character Ant-Man produce such strong energy out of his small body? The secret lies in the transistors on his suit that amplify weak signals for processing. Transistors that amplify electrical signals in the conventional way lose heat energy and limit the speed of signal transfer, which degrades performance. What if it were possible to overcome such limitations and make a high-performance suit that is light and small but without the loss of heat energy?

A POSTECH team of Professor Kyoung-Duck Park and Yeonjeong Koo from the Department of Physics and a team from ITMO University in Russia led by Professor Vasily Kravtsov jointly developed a nano-excitonic transistor using intralayer and interlayer excitons in heterostructure-based semiconductors, which addresses the limitations of existing transistors. The research was recently published in the journal ACS Nano.

Excitons are responsible for light emission of semiconductor materials and are key to developing a next-generation light-emitting element with less heat generation and a light source for quantum information technology due to the free conversion between light and material in their electrically neutral states.

There are two types of excitons in a semiconductor heterobilayer, which is a stack of two different semiconductor monolayers: the intralayer excitons with horizontal direction and the interlayer excitons with vertical direction.

Optical signals emitted by the two excitons have different lights, durations, and coherence times. This means that selective control of the two optical signals could enable the development of a two-bit exciton transistor. However, it was challenging to control intra- and interlayer excitons in nano-scale spaces due to the non-homogeneity of semiconductor heterostructures and low luminous efficiency of interlayer excitons in addition to the diffraction limit of light.
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Thinnest-ever freestanding film with ferroelectric properties
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-thinnest- ... rties.html
by Nagoya University

Researchers at the Institute for Future Materials and Systems at Nagoya University in Japan have successfully synthesized barium titanate (BaTiO3) nanosheets with a thickness of 1.8 nanometers, the thinnest thickness ever created for a free-standing film. Given that thickness is related to functionality, their findings open the door to smaller, more efficient devices. The research was published in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials.

The development of ever-thinner materials with new electronic functions is a highly competitive area of research. Such devices are especially important in ferroelectrics, materials that have a polarization that can be reversed by an electric field. This ability to reverse polarization makes these materials useful in memory and vibrational power generation.

However, as the materials used in these devices become smaller, they exhibit unexpected properties that complicate their industrial use. A big problem is the "size effect," as when the material's thickness is reduced to a few nanometers, its ferroelectric properties disappear.
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Nanotech Can Peek Inside Viruses and Detect Imperfections in Tiny Computer Chips
by Kendra Leon
April 26, 2023

Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — New nanotechnology created by the Australian National University can access light sources that are unseeable by the human eye and detect objects smaller than conventional microscopes can.

Cameras and other technologies already unveil low-frequency infra-red and high-frequency ultraviolet lights, but the Australian National University technology, developed in collaboration with the University of Brescia, the University of Arizona, and Korea University, can detect the very high frequencies of light called extreme-ultraviolet.

The nanotech increases light frequencies that other technologies see by up to seven times with 10 times the resolution, according to a study published in Science Advances Wednesday.

By using light to peer at objects thousands of times smaller than a human hair, co-author Dr. Sergey Kruk of Australian National university said via email that the nanotech avoids the risk of damaging samples the way electron microscopes do.

Conclusion:
“We hope the pursuit of this emerging direction of research will be increasing internationally, and the focus will be moving beyond fundamental principles towards applied research and development of such light sources for specific applications. As the next milestone, I hope to see collaborative projects with medical and biological researchers and with researchers of semiconductor foundries,” Kruk said.
Read more here: https://www.courthousenews.com/new-nan ... udy-says/
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Researchers observe extremely squeezed directional THz waves in thin semiconductor crystals
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-extremely ... stals.html
by Elhuyar Fundazioa
An international team of scientists has imaged and analyzed THz waves that propagate in the form of plasmon polaritons along thin anisotropic semiconductor platelets with wavelengths reduced by up to 65 times compared to THz waves in free space.

What's even more intriguing is that the wavelengths vary with the direction of propagation. Such THz waves can be applied for probing fundamental material properties at the nanometer scale and pave the way to the development of ultra-compact on-chip THz devices. The work has been published in Nature Materials.

Polaritons are hybrid states of light and matter that arise from the coupling of light with matter excitations. Plasmon and phonon polaritons are among the most prominent examples, formed by the coupling of light to collective electron oscillations and crystal lattice vibrations, respectively.

They play a crucial role in various applications, from sub-diffraction optical spectroscopy and ultrasensitive chemical sensors to ultracompact modulators for communication applications. In thin layers, polaritons can propagate with wavelengths up to 100 times shorter than the corresponding photon wavelength, allowing for manipulation of light on a much smaller scale than previously possible with conventional photonic devices.

While most of these ultra-confined polaritons have been observed in form of phonon polaritons in the mid-infrared spectral range, the researchers focused on plasmon polaritons, as these can exist in much broader spectral ranges. "On the other hand, plasmon polaritons often suffer from large damping, resulting in short propagation lengths. This has been challenging the observation of ultra-confined plasmon polaritons in real space," says Shu Chen, first author of the publication.
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Engineering self-integrated atomic quantum wires to form nano-networks
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-self-inte ... works.html
by Thamarasee Jeewandara , Phys.org
Quantum advances rely on the production of nanoscale wires that are based on several state-of-the-art nanolithographic technologies, to develop wires via bottom-up synthesis. However, a critical challenge is to grow uniform atomic crystalline wires and construct network structures to build nanocircuits.

In a new report in Science Advances, Tomoya Asaba and a team of researchers in physics and materials science at the Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo in Japan, and the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Germany, discovered a simple method to develop atomic-scale wires in the shape of nano-rings, stripes and X-/Y- junctions.

Using pulsed-laser-deposition, the physicists and materials scientists grew single crystalline, atomic-scale wires of a Mott insulator, which maintained a bandgap comparable to wide-gap semiconductors. Such wires were a unit cell in thickness and a few microns in length. The researchers observed atomic pattern formation through non-equilibrium reaction-diffusion processes to offer a hitherto unknown perspective on the phenomena of atomic-scale self-organization to gain insight to the formation of quantum architecture in nano-networks.
New methods to engineer atomic-scale nanowires

The basic features of most technical devices change when their dimensions are reduced. When a device is reduced to the nanoscale, the fabrication and integration of one-dimensional wire patterns become increasingly complex. Developing top-down approaches with large-scale equipment such as electron beam and focused ion beam lithography to include nanowires with a thickness and width less than 10 nanometers is another technical challenge.
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