Nanotechnology

Nanocatalysts are catalysts made up of nanoparticles or some other nanostructure such as a nanofoam. A catalyst is a material which increases the rate of a chemical reaction, without itself being altered or changed by the reaction. Nanostructures are engineered structures with features at the nanoscale — between one and 100 nanometers. An obvious advantage…

Nanostructures are engineered structures with features at the nanoscale — between 1 and 100 nanometers. They include nanotextured surfaces, nanoparticles and nanotubes, as well as more complex nano-scale structures. A nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, which is just slightly larger than the atomic scale — individual atoms in a solid are between…

Nanoparticles are engineered particles of between one and 100 nanometers in diameter, a size known as the nanoscale. To put this into context, a nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, and the distance between individual atoms in a solid is between 0.1 nm and 0.4 nm. Nanoparticles therefore range in size from tens…

A Bristol-led team of physicists has found a way to operate mass manufacturable photonic sensors at the quantum limit. This breakthrough paves the way for practical applications such as monitoring greenhouse gases and cancer detection. Sensors are a constant feature of our everyday lives. Although they often go unperceived, sensors provide critical information essential to…

By Savanah Weed, University Relations Coordinator, Troy University Troy University professors continually make advancements in their respective fields, most recently with Dr. Raj Vinnakota’s acceptance of a $161,597 grant from the National Science Foundation to further research building a device that would allow for faster data recording and processing at the photon level. Faster speeds…

Researchers in the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology are invited to register for the NanoScientific Symposium 2022, an international event that brings together researchers and entrepreneurs. To register, go to event.nanoscientific.org Global NanoScientific Symposium 2022 First launched in 2018, NanoScientific Symposium has brought together thousands of attendees in both live and virtual events for engaging…

From Brookhaven National Laboratory: From designing new biomaterials to novel photonic devices, new materials built through a process called bottom-up nanofabrication, or self-assembly, are opening up pathways to new technologies with properties tuned at the nanoscale. However, to fully unlock the potential of these new materials, researchers need to “see” into their tiny creations so…

CEA-Leti has announced that Elisa Vianello, senior scientist and Edge AI program coordinator, has received a $3.30 million (€3 million) grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to build nanoscale memory devices inspired by insect nervous systems for such applications as consumer robotics, implantable medical diagnostic microchips and wearable electronics. The artificial intelligence (AI) community…

MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Microhydraulic Motors are a new way of making things move on a microscale, providing a scalable actuation platform with a torque density that is two orders of magnitude higher than that of electric motors. These actuators have the power to enable precision medical robotics to perform minimally invasive surgeries, shape-changing materials or…

Sensors to detect viruses, explosives or drugs often use a technique called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in which light wavelengths from a chemical or biological species adsorbed on metal nanostructures are detected and mapped to the identity of the species. In SERS, detection efficiency depends on the surface morphology of the nanostructure. Now, scientists have…

Nanoengineering deals with structures at the nanoscale — between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, and the distance between individual atoms in a solid is between 0.1 nm and 0.4 nm. The nanoscale is therefore about as small as materials can get, without becoming individual atoms. Nanotechnology and…

By Karen McNulty Walsh and Stephanie Kossman, Brookhaven National Laboratory Research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory spans scales from the cosmic to subatomic, advancing our understanding of the world around and within us. Looking for discoveries that spark transformational technologies? Brookhaven has those, too! Here’s the 2021 recap of important…

By Yong Zhu and Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University Researchers at North Carolina State University demonstrated a low-cost technique for retrieving nanowires from electronic devices that have reached the end of their utility and then using those nanowires in new devices. The work is a step toward more sustainable electronics. “There is a lot…

by University of California San Diego Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells. The technology turns a conventional light microscope into what’s called a super-resolution…

By Troy Rummler Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have built the world’s smallest and best acoustic amplifier. And they did it using a concept that was all but abandoned for almost 50 years. According to a paper published May 13 in Nature Communications, the device is more than 10 times more effective than the earlier…

by Bill Schweber, Contributing Author The previous part of this article looked at the challenges of nanoflow sensors, especially with respect to blood flow. This part looks at graphene, which is the basis for the new sensor. Graphene is a material structure which did not exist until relatively recently. However, its constituent element of graphite…

by Bill Schweber, contributing author When it comes to nearly all biological measurements, the ranges of many of the parameters of interest are orders-of-magnitude below those with which many engineers are familiar. Instead of megahertz or even kilohertz, the living-creature world is in the single or double-digit hertz range, such as the roughly 60+ beats…

 By Theresa Duque Nitrogen dioxide, an air pollutant emitted by fossil fuel-powered cars and gas-burning stoves is not only bad for the climate – it’s bad for our health. Long-term exposure to NO2 has been linked to increased heart disease, respiratory diseases such as asthma, and infections. Nitrogen dioxide is odorless and invisible – so…

Materials science likes to take nature and the special properties of living beings that could potentially be transferred to materials as a model. A research team led by chemist Professor Andreas Walther of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has succeeded in endowing materials with a bioinspired property: Wafer-thin stiff nanopaper instantly becomes soft and elastic…

By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office Superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without resistance — are remarkable. They provide a macroscopic glimpse into quantum phenomena, which are usually observable only at the atomic level. Beyond their physical peculiarity, superconductors are also useful. They’re found in medical imaging, quantum computers and cameras used with telescopes.…

CEA announced today the acquisition of a Cryogenic Wafer Prober manufactured by Bluefors Oy, the Finnish specialist in designing and manufacturing ultralow temperature-dilution refrigerator systems for cutting-edge research in quantum computing and nanotechnology. CEA-Leti, a technology research institute at CEA, is the first microelectronics research institute to install this strategic equipment in its cleanroom. Created…

By Theresa Duque Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell’s proteins – the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes…

A research team at Sandia National Laboratories has successfully used machine learning — computer algorithms that improve themselves by learning patterns in data — to complete cumbersome materials science calculations more than 40,000 times faster than normal. Their results, published Jan. 4 in npj Computational Materials, could herald a dramatic acceleration in the creation of…

The animation depicts the controlled transport of a single molecule between two scanning tunneling microscope tips in an experiment at ORNL. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules.…

Graphene is a flat hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms, just one atom thick. It is a form of carbon related to carbon nanotubes and buckyballs (C60). Although it has always occurred naturally, it is only recently that it has been isolated and it’s individual properties examined. It is now known that graphene has exceptional electrical,…