Tag Archives: nanoscale

Forget exploiting carbon nanotubes electrochemically, and just wind them up like clockwork if you want to store energy. This is not quite the message that researchers at the University of Maryland Baltimore County are delivering, but it might as well be as a team from there is storing 2.1MJ/kg in twisted carbon nanotubes – more, weight-for-weight, than Li-ion chemistry can ...

Scientists in Australia have opened the door to self-assembling controllable nano-scale electronic and spintronic devices by discovering how magnetism arises in 2-d ‘kagome’ metal-organic frameworks. Kagome materials have repeating pattern of hexagons and smaller triangles, with the hexagons touching at their tips (images below). The word is Japanese, relating to a basket weaving pattern. In this case, the metal-organic is ...

Plasmon-coupled semiconductor surface states can down-convert 1550nm optical wavelengths to terahertz frequencies four-orders of magnitude more efficiently than non-linear optical methods, according to UCLA. When a crystal is a semiconductor – p-doped InAs in this case – the ‘surface states’ created by the left-over bonds that are inevitable on the outside of a crystal lattice can create high gradient electric ...

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is applying the art of Kirigami to the science of nano-scale manufacturing. The Academy’s researchers use a focused ion beam to cut a precise pattern in a free-standing gold nanofilm, then use the same beam to pull the nanopattern into a 3D shape. The pulling forces were induced by heterogeneous vacancies and the implanted ions ...

Researchers from the Femto-ST Institute in Besancon, France have fabricated the world’s smallest house using nano-robots. “For the first time we were able to realize patterning and assembly with less than two nanometers of accuracy, which is a very important result for the robotics and optical community,” says researcher Jean-Yves Rauch. The researchers combined all the technological components for nanoassembly—a ...

The European Commission has established a taskforce to devise new ways of designing future microchip memories that take into account the variability and unreliability of nano-scale transistors.

A pick of the main stories crossing the ElectronicsWeekly.com News Index this week, from Intel branding the Atom for "pocketable device" processors and the Georgia Institute of Technology finding nanoscale value in gold, to US board maker Curtiss-Wright Controls being on the UK acquisition trail and Spansion ramping 300mm NOR flash production...

Featuring electromechanical units 1nm in size, based on tiny chunks of diamond or a superhard piezoelectric material