Photocatalysts for water splitting are of particular importance to a renewable energy based energy and economic landscape. Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors hold significant promise because of their large surface area compared to bulk photocatalysts. To overcome the crucial problem of the short lifetime of photogenerated charges, 2D van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures are being considered due to

Lithium–oxygen batteries (LOBs) have drawn considerable attention in next generation energy storage systems owing to their large theoretical specific energy density. Unfortunately, the leakage of liquid electrolytes in LOBs generally causes major safety issues that hinder practical applications of LOBs. Therefore, it is significant to develop solid state electrolytes that can simultaneously avoid the

Seeking an ultra-compact new architecture or strategy to achieve filter-less Red/Green/Blue (RGB) color sensing is critical for developing a wide range of high-resolution, low-cost and flexible color discrimination and imaging applications. In this work, a new inversely stacked biomimetic radial junction (RJ) PINIP photodetector, comprising of coaxial multilayers of intrinsic and doped hydrogenated

Germanium (Ge) nanowires (NWs) were grown in-plane on nano-structured Si(001)/SiO 2 substrates by molecular beam epitaxy using gold (Au) as the solvent. The site-selective NW growth was enabled by a rectangular array of gold droplets on silicon (Si) tips with an Au nuclei density below 0.25 µ m −2 on the surrounding silicon oxide (SiO 2 ). The initial growth of Ge NWs starting from Si–Au droplets with

Computational electronic-structure calculations of nanoscale systems are powerful tools which provide fundamental insight, help interpret experiment results, and ultimately aid the development of new materials. Density functional theory (DFT) dominates this field, and has had an enormously beneficial impact on nanoscience. However, there are still many situations in which present DFT fails to provide

This review summarizes recent advances in the photonics of two-dimension transition metal carbides referred as MXenes. MXenes show outstanding nonlinear optical absorption and can serve as excellent mode-lockers to produce ultrafast pulse lasers at the broad range from visible to mid-infrared regions. Particularly, metallic MXenes have great advantages for long-wavelength applications and 3000-nm mode-locked

The recent proliferation of wearable electronics has kindled an increasing demand for energy storage technology with flexibility, good levels of safety and high ionic conductivity. In this regard, flexible solid-state aqueous batteries are currently considered to be promising candidates as power supplies for wearable electronic devices. Recently, binder-free nanoarrayed composites have have shown great

A high-temperature phase transition in strained ferroelectric K 0.9 Na 0.1 NbO 3 thin films epitaxially grown on orthorhombic (110) NdScO 3 substrates is identified and investigated by in situ x-ray diffraction and piezoresponse force microscopy. At room temperature, the thin films exhibit a highly anisotropic misfit strain, inducing the occurrence of monoclinic a 1 a 2 /M C phases and manifesting

In recent work we reported the vibrational spectrum of more than 100 000 known protein structures, and a self-consistent sonification method to render the spectrum in the audible range of frequencies (Qin and Buehler 2019 Extreme Mech. Lett . 100460). Here we present a method to transform these molecular vibrations into materialized vibrations of thin water films using acoustic actuators, leading to

The outcome of machine learning is influenced by the features used to describe the data, and various metrics are used to measure model performance. In this study we use five different feature sets to describe the same 4000 gold nanoparticles, and 14 different machine learning methods to compare a total of 70 high scoring models. We then use classification and regression to show which meta-features

Driven by increasing interests in sequencing proteins, several single molecule methods (such as the measurement of electron tunneling currents through each amino acid) have been recently proposed and demonstrated in experiment. While promising, they are still in early stages and challenges such as the lack of protein stretching and large thermal fluctuations of amino acids remain to be solved. Here

Interest has been growing in electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding materials in view of soaring EM radiation and its pollution control, which is necessary for public health and normal communication. To realize high EMI shielding effectiveness (SE), two factors of high electrical conductivity and strong multiple reflections are quite important. However, it is still a big challenge to obtain these

Nanostructured copper sulfides have been known as functional materials in a wide range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering and biomedicine. The combination and/or functionalization of nanostructured copper sulfides with other active materials, in the form of nanocomposites, helps to achieve synergies that allows them to be utilized in advanced applications. This review

We present a new contact resonance force microscopy (CRFM) imaging technique, isomorphic contact resonance (iso-CR), that acquires data at a constant contact resonance (CR) frequency, and hence constant tip-sample contact stiffness across the scan area. Constant CR frequency is obtained by performing force versus distance measurements to vary the applied force at each pixel (i.e. force-volume mapping

Nano-sized extracellular vesicles have become an interesting target for fluorescent labelling due to their complex roles within cellular processes. Extracellular vesicles are released by most cells, including bacteria and mammalian and have demonstrated clear involvement within cellular, as well as patho-physiological processes. They contain information about the cell they originate from and communicate

Experimental data and a supporting model are presented for the formation of voids in InN nanorods grown by selective area hydride vapor phase epitaxy on patterned GaN/ c -Al 2 O 3 templates. It is shown that these voids shape, due to a high lattice mismatch between InN and GaN materials, starts from the base and extends up to a half of the total length of the nanorods. When the effect of the mismatch

Hierarchical nanostructure, an engineered nanostructure with a higher assembly-level of constituents by low dimensional nano-building blocks, has received extensive attentions in the latest advancements in nanomaterial science and nanotechnology development. The ordered hierarchical nanostructures could offer merits such as more active sites, synergistic properties owing to their geometric complexity

We report local nitride-stressor engineering in combination with quantum-size tunability in Ge quantum dots (QDs) for tailoring photoluminescence (PL) wavelength and exciton lifetime. Spherical-shaped Ge QDs with tunable diameters ranging from 25–90 nm embedded within layers of thermally-grown SiO 2 and chemical-vapor-deposited Si 3 N 4 were fabricated by thermal oxidation of lithographically-patterned

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are usually synthesized by the chemical vapor deposition method, in which the resultant SWCNT’s chirality and diameter are sensitive to the catalyst and the experimental conditions. To gain effective control over the geometry of SWCNTs, we propose to grow SWCNTs by stacking carbon rings in a layer-by-layer mode, taking advantage of the high reactivity of carbon

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the concept of a ubiquitous computing ecosystem in which electronics of custom form factors are seamlessly embedded into everyday objects. At the heart of the IoT are electronic sensors capable of detecting physical/environmental phenomena, translating these measurements into electrical signals, and wirelessly transmitting the data for remote computing. Critical to the

Powered by the mutual developments in instrumentation, materials and theoretical descriptions, sensing and imaging capabilities of quantum emitters in solids have significantly increased in the past two decades. Quantum emitters in solids, whose properties resemble those of atoms and ions, provide alternative ways to probing natural and artificial nanoscopic systems with minimum disturbance and ultimate

By combining density functional theory with low-energy effective Hamiltonian, we demonstrate strain-engineered electronic and topological properties of the recently synthesized two-dimensional (2D) bismuthene on SiC(0001) substrate. As bismuthene on SiC(0001) exhibits an indirect gap of 0.62 eV with nontrivial topology, we show that the band gap size can be further increased by an applied tensile strain

In this paper we revisit the structure of graphene oxide, and determine the pure and truly representative structures for graphene nanoflakes using machine learning. Using 20 396 random configurations relaxed at the electronic structure level, we observe the presence of hydroxyl, ether, double bonds, aliphatic (cyclohexane) disruption, defects and significant out-of-plane distortions that go beyond

Using top-down fabricated silicon nanoribbons, we measure the opening and closing of ion channels alamethicin and gramicidin A. A capacitive model of the system is proposed to demonstrate that the geometric capacitance of the nanoribbon is charged by ion channel currents. The integration of top-down nanoribbons with electrophysiology holds promise for integration of electrically active living systems

We present measurements of focal spot size and brightness in a focused ion beam system utilizing a laser-cooled atomic beam source of Cs ions. Spot sizes as small as (2.1 ± 0.2) nm (one standard deviation) and reduced brightness values as high as (2.4 ± 0.1) × 107 A m-2 Sr-1 eV-1 are observed with a 10 keV beam. This measured brightness is over 24 times higher than the highest brightness observed in

Proteins are insulating molecular solids, yet even those containing easily reduced or oxidized centers can have single-molecule electronic conductances that are too large to account for with conventional transport theories. Here, we report the observation of remarkably high electronic conductance states in an electrochemically-inactive protein, the ~200 kD αVβ3 extracelluar domain of human integrin