Researchers devise tunable conducting edge

Phys.org  September 5, 2022 An international team of researchers (USA – UC Riverside, Israel, Japan) stacked monolayer WTe2 with an insulating ferromagnet of several atomic layer thickness—of Cr2Ge2Te6 (CGT) and found that the WTe2 had developed ferromagnetism with a conducting edge. The edge flow of the electrons was unidirectional and could be made to switch directions with the use of an external magnetic field. When only the edge conducts electricity, the size of the interior of the material is inconsequential, allowing electronic devices that use such materials to be made smaller. Currently, the technology works only at very low temperatures; […]

Live wire: New research on nanoelectronics

Phys.org  February 25, 2022 Researchers at Arizona State University have shown that a protein poised between a pair of electrodes could act as an efficient conductor of electrons. Proteins may have better conductance properties than similar nanowires composed of DNA. The expanded alphabet of 20 amino acids used to construct them offers an enhanced toolkit for nano architects when compared with just four nucleotides making up DNA. The researchers used protein segments in four nanometer increments, ranging from 4-20 nanometers in length. When the protein nanowires exceeded six nanometers in length, their conductance outperformed molecular nanowires. The data showed that […]

Less than a nanometer thick, stronger and more versatile than steel

Science Daily  April 5, 2021 A team of researchers in the US (Northwestern University, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Florida) grew borophene on a silver substrate then exposed it to hydrogen to form the borophane and unraveled its structure by combining a scanning tunneling microscope with a computer-vision based algorithm that compares theoretical simulations of structures with experimental measurements. They found a borophane nanosheet on a silver substrate to be quite stable making it easy to integrate it with other materials in the construction of new devices for optoelectronics, it could boost performance for electronic devices, solar cells, batteries, and […]

Faster data transfer through plasmons

Nanowerk  February 22, 2018 Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) function like photonic elements, carrying information at high speeds. Researchers in Singapore designed transducers comprising aluminum and gold electrodes, separated by a two nanometer-thick layer of aluminum oxide that acts as an insulating ‘quantum tunneling’ barrier. Electrons that make the quantum leap across this gap will either generate or detect SPPs. By joining two transducers with a plasmonic waveguide, so that one acted as a source and another as detector they observed about 1 in 7 of the tunneling electrons coupling to a SPP. The invention has potential applications in three-dimensional integrated […]

Researchers invented light-emitting nanoantennas based on halide perovskites

Nanowerk  February 12, 2018 Using hybrid perovskite an international team of researchers (Russia, USA – UT Dallas, Australia) managed to combine a nanoantenna and a light source in a single nanoparticle. It can generate, enhance and route emission via excited resonant modes coupled with excitons. The study shows that combination of excitons with the Mie resonance in perovskite nanoparticles makes them efficient light sources at room temperature. In addition, the radiation spectrum of the nanoparticles can be changed by varying the anions in the composition of the material. The research makes the new nanoparticles a promising platform for creating compact […]

A transistor of graphene nanoribbons

Source: Science Daily, November 29, 2017 Graphene becomes a semiconductor in the form of nanoribbons which has a sufficiently large energy or band gap in which no electron states can exist: it can be turned on and off — and thus may become a key component of nanotransistors. However, graphene ribbons with irregular edges may not exhibit the desired electrical properties. An international team of researchers (USA – UC Berkeley, Switzerland) succeeded in growing ribbons exactly nine atoms wide with a regular armchair edge from precursor molecules. After several process steps, they formed the desired nanoribbons of about one nanometer […]