Lifeboat Foundation

Creating novel materials by combining layers with unique, beneficial properties seems like a fairly intuitive process—stack up the materials and stack up the benefits. This isn’t always the case, however. Not every material will allow energy to travel through it the same way, making the benefits of one material come at the cost of another.

Using cutting-edge tools, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Warsaw have created a new layered structure with 2D materials that exhibits a unique transfer of energy and charge. Understanding its material properties may lead to advancements in technologies such as solar cells and other optoelectronic devices. The results were published in the journal Nano Letters.

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of materials structured like sandwiches with atomically thin layers. The meat of a TMD is a transition metal, which can form chemical bonds with electrons on their outermost orbit or shell, like most elements, as well as the next shell. That metal is sandwiched between two layers of chalcogens, a category of elements that contains oxygen, sulfur, and selenium.

Researchers have developed “smart rust,” iron oxide nanoparticles that clean water by attracting pollutants such as oil, nano-and microplastics, glyphosate, and even estrogen hormones.

Pouring flecks of rust into water typically makes it dirtier. However, a groundbreaking development by researchers has led to the creation of “smart rust,” a type of iron oxide nanoparticle that can purify water. This smart rust has the unique ability to attract various pollutants, such as oil, nano-and microplastics, and the herbicide glyphosate, depending on the particles’ coating. What makes it even more efficient is its magnetic nature, which allows easy removal from water using a magnet, taking the pollutants along with it. Recently, the team has optimized these particles to capture estrogen hormones, which can be detrimental to aquatic life.

Presentation and Significance.

A thin film patterned with nanoantennas exhibits negative refraction of light, a useful feature for subwavelength imaging.

Materials that refract light the “wrong way” could be used to make optical lenses that can image objects smaller than visible wavelengths. So-called negative refraction has been demonstrated in thin films in which surface plasmons—collective charge oscillations—have been excited by a powerful laser. Now, an international team involving Purdue University, Indiana, the University of Glasgow, UK, and Imperial College London show that they can more efficiently achieve the same effect by placing an array of nanoscale antennas on the film.

An electromechanical device allows researchers to control and study how a nanoscale beam buckles when compressed.

The buckling of a column or other structural element is typically something that engineers want to avoid, but a new device offers a way to control this type of deformation on microscopic scales. The design combines small actuators and circuits that generate mechanical and electrostatic forces on a nanoscale beam, causing it to buckle to the left or to the right. By manipulating the beam’s deformation, researchers may be able to harness buckling for sensitive detectors or for testing the relationship between thermodynamics and computing.

Two molecular languages at the origin of life have been successfully recreated and mathematically validated, thanks to pioneering work by Canadian scientists at Université de Montréal.

The study, “Programming chemical communication: allostery vs. multivalent mechanism,” published August 15, 2023 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, opens new doors for the development of nanotechnologies with applications ranging from biosensing, drug delivery and molecular imaging.

Living organisms are made up of billions of nanomachines and nanostructures that communicate to create higher-order entities able to do many essential things, such as moving, thinking, surviving and reproducing.

Canadian researchers at the University of Montreal have successfully recreated and mathematically confirmed two molecular languages at the origin of life.

Their groundbreaking findings, recently published in the Journal of American Chemical Society, pave the way for advancements in nanotechnologies, offering potential in areas like biosensing, drug delivery, and molecular imaging.

Living organisms are made up of billions of nanomachines and nanostructures that communicate to create higher-order entities able to do many essential things, such as moving, thinking, surviving, and reproducing.

Zeolites have unique porous atomic structures and are useful as catalysts, ion exchangers and molecular sieves. It is difficult to directly observe the local atomic structures of the material via electron microscopy due to low electron irradiation resistance. As a result, the fundamental property-structure relationships of the constructs remain unclear.

Recent developments of a low-electron dose imaging method known as optimum bright-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (OBF STEM) offers a method to reconstruct images with a high signal-to-noise ratio with high dose efficiency.

In this study, Kousuke Ooe and a team of scientists in engineering and nanoscience at the University of Tokyo and the Japan Fine Ceramics Center performed low-dose atomic resolution observations with the method to visualize atomic sites and their frameworks between two types of zeolites. The scientists observed the complex atomic structure of the twin-boundaries in a faujasite-type (FAU) zeolite to facilitate the characterization of local atomic structures across many electron beam-sensitive materials.

Rice University chemists have discovered that tiny gold “seed” particles, a key ingredient in one of the most common nanoparticle recipes, are one and the same as gold buckyballs, 32-atom spherical molecules that are cousins of the carbon buckyballs discovered at Rice in 1985.

Carbon buckyballs are hollow 60-atom molecules that were co-discovered and named by the late Rice chemist Richard Smalley. He dubbed them “buckminsterfullerenes” because their atomic structure reminded him of architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, and the “fullerene” family has grown to include dozens of hollow molecules.

In 2019, Rice chemists Matthew Jones and Liang Qiao discovered that golden fullerenes are the gold “seed” particles chemists have long used to make gold nanoparticles. The find came just a few months after the first reported synthesis of gold buckyballs, and it revealed chemists had unknowingly been using the golden molecules for decades.

Individual graphene nanoribbons synthesized by an on-surface approach can be contacted with carbon nanotubes—with diameters as small as 1 nm—and used to make multigate devices that exhibit quantum transport effects such as Coulomb blockade and single-electron tunnelling.