This week in nanotechnology - July 8, 2011

A discovery in semiconductor nanowire laser technology could potentially do everything from kill viruses to increase storage capacity of DVDs. Ultraviolet semiconductor diode lasers are widely used in data processing, information storage and biology. Their applications have been limited, however, by size, cost and power. The current generation of ultraviolet lasers is based on a material called gallium nitride, but researchers have made a breakthrough in zinc oxide nanowire waveguide lasers, which can offer smaller sizes, lower costs, higher powers and shorter wavelengths.

The making of three-dimensional nanostructured materials has become a fertile area of research, producing materials that are useful for electronics, photonics, phononics and biomedical devices. But the methods of making such materials have been limited in the 3-D complexity they can produce. Now, an MIT team has found a way to produce more complicated structures by using a blend of current "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches. Their new 3D nanofabrication method makes it possible to manufacture complex multi-layered solids all in one step.

A high-temperature superconductor can now be switched on and off within a trillionth of a second. A team of physicists has realized an ultrafast superconducting switch by using intense terahertz pulses. This experiment opens up the possibility to discover more about the still unsettled cause of this type of superconductivity, and also hints at possible applications for ultrafast electronics in the future.
The superconducting transport between the layers of a cuprate crystal (three layers, red and blue spheres represent the oxygen and copper atoms respectively) is controlled with an ultrashort terahertz pulse (yellow in the background). The three-dimensional superconductivity can thus be switched on and off very quickly (orange spheres represent electrons).

Observation of a scientific rule being broken can sometimes lead to new knowledge and important applications. Such would seem to be the case when scientists created artificial molecules of semiconductor nanocrystals and watched them break a fundamental principle of photoluminescence known as Kasha's rule. Named for chemist Michael Kasha, who proposed it in 1950, Kasha's rule holds that when light is shined on a molecule, the molecule will only emit light (fluorescence or phosphorescence) from its lowest energy excited state. This is why photoluminescent molecules emit light at a lower energy than the excitation light. While there have been examples of organic molecules, such as azulene, that break Kasha's rule, these examples are rare. Highly luminescent molecular systems crafted from quantum dots that break Kasha's rule have not been reported – until now.

Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

This week in nanotechnology - July 1, 2011

Scientists in Austria have developed light-detectors made of graphene and analyzed their astonishing properties. They demonstrated how remarkably fast graphene converts light pulses into electrical signals. This could considerably improve date exchange between computers.

Physicists working at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Konstanz in Germany have developed a breakthrough in the use of diamond in quantum physics, marking an important step toward quantum computing. They were able to coax the fragile quantum information contained within a single electron in diamond to move into an adjacent single nitrogen nucleus, and then back again using on-chip wiring.

Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers. Today's silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets – like tiny refrigerator magnets – for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons.
Nanomagnetic computers use tiny bar magnets to store and process information. The interactions between the polarized, north-south magnetic fields of closely spaced magnets allow logic operations like those in conventional transistors.

Scientists have discovered fundamental steps of charging of nano-sized water droplets and unveiled the long-sought-after mechanism of hydrogen emission from irradiated water. It has been known since the early 1980s that while single electrons may attach to small water clusters containing as few as two molecules, only much larger clusters may attach more than single electrons. Size-selected, multiple-electron, negatively-charged water clusters have not been observed — until now.

In science and industry, polymer nanocomposites are increasingly regarded as materials that will significantly help to define progress in the 21st century. They consist of a polymer matrix and of nanoparticles which are inserted into the matrix as filler materials. A research group in Germany has now developed a process which opens an avenue for the production of new, completely miscible nanocomposites. These materials represent an extremely varied potential for technological innovations.