Technology Update

Graphene nanoribbons can slide across gold atoms without almost any friction, according to new experiments by researchers in Switzerland, Japan and Germany. Graphene’s superlubricity means that it could be used as an ultrasmooth coating in machine components, so drastically reducing energy losses in these machines. Nanoribbon coatings might also help to considerably increase the lifetime […]

Researchers in Moldova, Australia, the UK and Germany have developed a new way to improve the electrical and optical properties of gallium nitride by photoelectrochemically etching the material once it has been grown by a technique known as hydride vapour phase epitaxy (HPVE). Gallium nitride is a wide gap semiconducting compound and is the second […]

Encapsulating the chemotherapy drug irinotecan in lipid-coated silica nanocarriers could reduce its toxicity, according to new experiments by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles. The strategy might be used to treat patients suffering from pancreatic cancer………. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/64048 MSNPs deliver irinotecan

When a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to a graphene sheet, electrons in the material move in circular cyclotron orbits. These circular orbits have been imaged for the first time by researchers at Harvard University in the US and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. Imaging electron motion in this way could help […]

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have made the first high-performance and robust lasers from caesium lead halide nanowires that could be used in on-chip photonic and spectroscopic applications, such as optical communications, imaging and sensing. The lasing colour of the devices can also easily be tuned […]

Researchers in Sweden and the US say they have developed a technique to grow compositionally graded heterostructured materials along the axes of semiconducting nanowires. The method allows them to design and create complex nano-architectures in which electrons are confined and forced to move through a quasi-1D potential landscape. These types of structures could be used […]

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, and the IBS Center for Multdimensional Carbon Materials at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology have developed a new way to make high-quality “Bernal-stacked” bilayer graphene – an important material for electronics and photonics. The material might be used in a variety of […]

A new technique that uses diamonds and quantum logic to detect the tiny magnetic fields of single molecules has been unveiled by researchers in the US and Germany. The team then used the technique to detect nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals from single molecules of a common protein. The researchers are now refining the method […]

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new solution-based, cost-effective way to wrap reduced graphene oxide around the surface of ultrathin transparent conducting copper nanowires. The technique significantly improves the stability of the wires in air and reduces the amount of light scattered by the […]

The first boron films that are just one atom thick have been produced by a team of researchers at several institutes in the US. A preliminary study of the ultrathin material called “borophene” suggests that it displays a variety of fascinating and potentially useful properties, including direction-dependent conductivity. However, unlike graphene – which comprises a […]

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin say that they have fabricated flexible radio-frequency transistors from molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) with the highest ever intrinsic cut-off frequency of 5.6 GHz and power gain of 3.3 GHz. The devices, which are grown by chemical vapour deposition on large sheets of silica, could find use in a […]

Scanning probe microscopy is ideal for studying the nanoworld because it allows researchers to measure the topographic, electronic, optical and magnetic properties of a sample depending on the type of probe employed. Spin-based quantum probes, for example, are particularly good for making such measurements, but until now have only been able to acquire images relatively […]

Researchers at the University of Michigan in the US in collaboration with teams in South Korea and Spain have made a new class of chiral composite nanomaterials whose optical properties can be modulated by simply stretching the structures. The composites, which contain chains of plasmonic colloidal gold nanoparticles dispersed in polymer thin films, might be […]

A new “bubble-pen” lithography technique can be used to pattern colloidal and biological particles on solid-state substrates according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. The technique, which works by using laser-controlled microbubbles to create the patterns, will find a wide range of applications in microelectronics, nanophotonics and nanomedicine…… http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/63602 The pattern-writing process

From DNA sequencing and energy storage technology based on coffee dregs, to computers modelled on amoebae, chip features below 7 nm and the International Year of Light, it’s been a great year for nanotechnology. Here are some of the highlights…. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/63600

Researchers at Rice University in the US have measured the stiffness of different types of joined-up nanotubes in the most detail ever, and have found that some shapes are tougher than others. The work could help in the design of nanotube-based materials for specific applications in the future, as well as to build 3D structures […]