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Silicon’s inability to produce light efficiently has been stymying attempts to develop optical devices from the microelectronics industry’s favourite element. Fabricating the material in a nanocrystalline form could help but many promising applications – such as waveguides, CMOS chips and non-volatile memories – are not compatible with the high temperatures used to produce silicon nanocrystals. […]

Spectrometry – the measurement of the relative contributions of different wavelengths in a light source – is an invaluable analytical technique used by science and technology professionals in a broad range of disciplines. Now a spectrometer has been developed using quantum-dot materials, which allows the devices to be made as small and cheap as smart […]

The first high-performance, flexible storage device based on the ferroelectric material lead zirconium titanate (or PZT) has been developed by researchers in Saudi Arabia. The nonvolatile memory boasts the highest polarization, capacitance and endurance values ever reported for a flexible ferroelectric capacitor. The device might find applications in wearable electronics, health-monitoring systems and ultradense information-storage […]

Nanocapsules with cores containing natural ingredients could be used to destroy bacterial biofilms without harming mammalian cells, according to new work by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the US. As well as being antimicrobial, the capsules also appear to increase the number of fibroblasts in the cells being treated, which means that […]

The “Verwey” transition is the temperature (of around 123 K) at which magnetite (Fe3O4) goes from a being metal to an insulator. Thanks to new experiments on stoichiometric Fe3O4 nanocrystals, researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and Seoul National University in Korea have now found that this transition disappears in particles that are smaller […]

Researchers at Imperial College London have succeeded in growing ultrathin synthetic membranes that can filter out small molecules from organic solutes. The films, which are made from polyamide, are less than 10 nm thick and work by allowing solvents to pass through them while retaining larger solute molecules. They can also be made to have a […]

The first on-chip, visible-light source that uses “wonder material” graphene as a filament has been created by an international team of researchers. The team found that small strips of freely suspended graphene, attached to metal electrodes, can reach temperatures of up to 2800 K, allowing it to emit visible light. The research, while preliminary, opens up […]

Researchers at Columbia University in New York and Stanford University in California have succeeded in controlling the optical response of atomically thin materials on very short time-scales. The finding advances our understanding of many-body phenomena in low-dimensional systems and could help in the development of photonic devices from these novel nanostructured materials….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/61577 The experimental […]