Technology Update

Brittle nanocrystalline metals can be made ultrastrong and tough by firing them at extremely high speeds onto a hard target, according to new experiments on silver microcubes by researchers at Rice University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The impact produces an extreme gradient-nano-grained (GNG) structure in the microcubes that has a grain size […]

“Movies” of electrons as they move across a semiconductor junction have been made by researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan using a new imaging technique. Combining photoemission electron microscopy with femtosecond laser pump-probe methods, the technique tracks the motion of electrons on timescales shorter than 1 ps. The researchers say it […]

Researchers at Stanford University in the US and the University of Oxford in the UK have developed a new perovskite that can harvest infrared photons very well. When used together with another perovskite semiconductor that can harvest visible photons, the tandem device can covert solar energy into electricity with 20% efficiency. This figure could be […]

Researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis have invented a new ultralow power technique to trap nanoparticles in the sub-10 nm gaps between two gold electrodes. The technique, which overcomes many of the problems encountered in traditional dielectrophoresis experiments, could help make portable biosensors….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66547 Making nanogap electrodes

Researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US are the first to combine experimental and theoretical approaches at the atomic level to study how monolayer molybdenum sulphide (a typical 2D material) fractures. Thanks to transmission electron microscopy observations, backed up with large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, […]