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When nanotechnology meets quantum physics in 1 dimension

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23-Jan-2014

Contact: Chris Chipello christopher.chipello@mcgill.ca 514-398-4201 McGill University

How would electrons behave if confined to a wire so slender they could pass through it only in single-file?

The question has intrigued scientists for more than half a century. In 1950, Japanese Nobel Prize winner Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, followed by American physicist Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger in 1963, came up with a mathematical model showing that the effects of one particle on all others in a one-dimensional line would be much greater than in two- or three-dimensional spaces. Among quantum physicists, this model came to be known as the "Luttinger liquid" state.

Until very recently, however, there had been only a few successful attempts to test the model in devices similar to those in computers, because of the engineering complexity involved. Now, scientists from McGill University and Sandia National Laboratories have succeeded in conducting a new experiment that supports the existence of the long-sought-after Luttinger liquid state. Their findings, published in the Jan. 23 issue of Science Express, validate important predictions of the Luttinger liquid model.

The experiment was led by McGill PhD student Dominique Laroche under the supervision of Professor Guillaume Gervais of McGill's Department of Physics and Dr. Michael Lilly of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. The new study follows on the team's discovery in 2011 of a way to engineer one of the world's smallest electronic circuits, formed by two wires separated by only about 15 nanometers, or roughly 150 atoms.

What does one-dimensional quantum physics involve? Gervais explains it this way: "Imagine that you are driving on a highway and the traffic is not too dense. If a car stops in front of you, you can get around it by passing to the left or right. That's two-dimensional physics. But if you enter a tunnel with a single lane and a car stops, all the other cars behind it must slam on the brakes. That's the essence of the Luttinger liquid effect. The way electrons behave in the Luttinger state is entirely different because they all become coupled to one another."

To scientists, "what is so fascinating and elegant about quantum physics in one dimension is that the solutions are mathematically exact," Gervais adds. "In most other cases, the solutions are only approximate."

Making a device with the correct parameters to conduct the experiment was no simple task, however, despite the team's 2011 discovery of a way to do so. It took years of trial, and more than 250 faulty devices each of which required 29 processing steps before Laroche's painstaking efforts succeeded in producing functional devices yielding reliable data. "So many things could go wrong during the fabrication process that troubleshooting the failed devices felt like educated guesswork at times," explains Laroche. "Adding in the inherent failure rate compounded at each processing step made the fabrication of these devices extremely challenging."

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When nanotechnology meets quantum physics in 1 dimension

Nanotechnology Advance: Electronic Whiskers For Robotics

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January 22, 2014

[ Watch the Video: Cats Inspire Nanotechnology Whiskers For Robotics ]

April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Nanotechnology has brought us many advances such as electronic skin (e-skin) and electronic eye implants (e-eyes), and now, a research team from Berkeley Lab and the University of California Berkeley is on the verge of creating electronic whiskers.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the tactile sensors the team has created from composite films of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles similar to the highly sensitive whiskers of cats and rats. The pressure of a single Pascal equivalent to the pressure exerted on a table surface by a dollar bill can be felt by the new e-whiskers. The researchers see many potential applications, including giving robots new abilities to see and feel their surrounding environment.

Whiskers are hair-like tactile sensors used by certain mammals and insects to monitor wind and navigate around obstacles in tight spaces, Ali Javey, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Labs Materials Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer science, told Berkeley Labs Lynn Yarris. Our electronic whiskers consist of high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers coated with conductive composite films of nanotubes and nanoparticles. In tests, these whiskers were 10 times more sensitive to pressure than all previously reported capacitive or resistive pressure sensors.

Javey and his team are leaders in the electronic skin development, along with other flexible electronic devices that interface with the environment. In making the whiskers, the team used a carbon nanotube paste to form an electrically conductive network matrix. This was loaded with a thin film of silver nanoparticles that endowed the matrix with high sensitivity to mechanical strain.

The strain sensitivity and electrical resistivity of our composite film is readily tuned by changing the composition ratio of the carbon nanotubes and the silver nanoparticles, Javey said in a statement. The composite can then be painted or printed onto high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers to form e-whiskers that can be integrated with different user-interactive systems.

According to Javey, using elastic fibers with a small spring constant as the structural component of the whiskers provided large deflection. This caused high strain in response to the smallest applied pressures. To demonstrate proof-of-concept, the research team successfully used their e-whiskers to create highly accurate 2D and 3D mapping of wind flow. E-whiskers could be used in the future to mediate tactile sensing for the spatial mapping of nearby objects. This could also lead to wearable sensors for measuring heartbeat and pulse rate.

Our e-whiskers represent a new type of highly responsive tactile sensor networks for real time monitoring of environmental effects, Javey said. The ease of fabrication, light weight and excellent performance of our e-whiskers should have a wide range of applications for advanced robotics, human-machine user interfaces, and biological applications.

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Nanotechnology Advance: Electronic Whiskers For Robotics

Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics studies cellular-level processes

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The Centre of Excellence in Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP), a newly established collaborative research program based at the University of Adelaide, will begin its work in earnest later this month with a kick-off meeting in the Australian city.

Announced in December 2013 as one of a dozen new centers backed by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and supported by AUS$23 million from the government agency, CNBP aims to develop novel biophotonics techniques suitable for the study of living cells within biological systems.

"The challenge we want to focus on is understanding the biology of single cells and cellular processes, without the need to take the cells out of the body and rely on traditional microscopy," commented Tanya Monro, director of the university's Institute for Photonics & Advanced Sensing and now director of CNBP.

The center has defined three initial target challenges, formulated so as to tackle some currently challenging questions in cell biology. They include exploring approaches to sensing in and around developing embryos; probing immune signals linked to touch and pain in the central nervous system, in order to investigate the origins of sensation; and exploring the role of the endothelium within blood vessels and the damaging effects of plaque.

These challenges have in turn led to the four themes which currently form the center's research agenda: creating novel light sources for interrogating biomolecules; creating smart surfaces for photonic structures and nanoparticles; creating nanophotonic architectures customized to enhance light-matter interactions at the nanoscale for biological measurement; and identifying specific molecular changes for measurement using advanced molecular sensors.

The themes give an indication of the combination of techniques and novel thinking that the center hopes to foster, an aspect reflected in the Centre's name.

"'Nanoscale' represents the fact that the technology suite we will be developing brings together nanofabrication and nanophotonics, building on the convergence of nanotechnology and photonics," noted Monro. "A lot of current biophotonics technologies are concerned only with imaging modalities, but these nanoscale techniques can go further than that."

A number of recent developments in the field of nanoscale probes give an indication of how these complementary technologies might be fruitfully exploited in areas of interest to CNBP.

One example is the use of carefully manufactured nanocrystals, referred to as upconversion nanoparticles, that can be excited by infra-red irradiation and then emit in a very localized fashion in the visible range.

A recent paper, co-authored by research groups now connected with CNBP, showed how the entry of a single such particle into an advanced nanostructured optical fiber could be detected at the other end of the fiber, potentially allowing nanoscale measurements to be made at a distance. This could in turn provide a means of making some of these measurements within living organisms.

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Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics studies cellular-level processes

What is Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials? – Dragonfly Education – Video

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What is Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials? - Dragonfly Education
Dragonfly Education is an education company, that is building proprietary education content for higher learning in technical streams. We are enabling B.Tech engineering students to learn more...

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What is Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials? - Dragonfly Education - Video

Students to learn about robotics, renewable energy and smart devices

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High school students interested in a career in robotics, renewable energy, nanotechnology and the next generation of smart devices will be fascinated by the University of Canterburys E-Week camp from January 20 to 24.

The one-week camp provides a special opportunity for Year 12 and 13 students to get hands-on laboratory experience, visit local companies, drive an electric go-cart, build and programme their own robot and build a solar cell.

The activities, provided by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are designed to open students' eyes to the teaching and research that occurs at the University of Canterbury (UC).

Professor Phil Bones says students can experiment on solar cell construction in the nanotechnology laboratory, which is part of the McDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.

We will show students the rudiments of programming a microcomputer to control a robot. This relates well to research by Dr Chris Hann who is helping with the Canterbury rebuild.

His team's Rover robot, designed to inspect for damage to piles under buildings, is being used by a government-owned company responsible for settling claims from the earthquakes. Southern Response/Arrow International has been using the UC Rover robot since September.

The students will spend a day during the week looking at aspects of electric power engineering.

The department has a strong link to New Zealand's electric power industry in the form of the Electric Power Engineering Centre (EPECentre), which is a sponsor of E-Week, and has won a large research funding grant to improve and provide a stronger national green grid.

The result of the research will be an efficient, cost-effective and robust electricity network meeting the ongoing and changing power supply needs of New Zealanders. The research is led by Dr Allan Miller of the UC EPECentre.

Students will also get to see the activities of local companies that employ electrical and computer engineering graduates to perform a wide range of engineering tasks. The companies this year are Tait Communications, Enatel, Transpower and Bluewater Systems, Professor Bones says.

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Students to learn about robotics, renewable energy and smart devices

Students to learn about robotics and renewable energy

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Students to learn about robotics, renewable energy and smart devices January 19, 2014 High school students interested in a career in robotics, renewable energy, nanotechnology and the next generation of smart devices will be fascinated by the University of Canterburys E-Week camp from January 20 to 24. The one-week camp provides a special opportunity for Year12 and 13 students to get hands-on laboratory experience, visit local companies, drive an electric go-cart, build and programme their own robot and build a solar cell. The activities, provided by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are designed to open students' eyes to the teaching and research that occurs at the University of Canterbury (UC). Professor Phil Bones says students can experiment on solar cell construction in the nanotechnology laboratory, which is part of the McDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. ``We will show students the rudiments of programming a microcomputer to control a robot. This relates well to research by Dr Chris Hann who is helping with the Canterbury rebuild. ``His team's Rover robot, designed to inspect for damage to piles under buildings, is being used by a government-owned company responsible for settling claims from the earthquakes. Southern Response/Arrow International has been using the UC Rover robot since September. ``The students will spend a day during the week looking at aspects of electric power engineering. ``The department has a strong link to New Zealand's electric power industry in the form of the Electric Power Engineering Centre (EPECentre), which is a sponsor of E-Week, and has won a large research funding grant to improve and provide a stronger national green grid. ``The result of the research will be an efficient, cost-effective and robust electricity network meeting the ongoing and changing power supply needs of New Zealanders.The research is led by Dr Allan Miller of the UC EPECentre. ``Students will also get to see the activities of local companies that employ electrical and computer engineering graduates to perform a wide range of engineering tasks. The companies this year are Tait Communications, Enatel, Transpower and Bluewater Systems, Professor Bones says.

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Students to learn about robotics and renewable energy

Google’s New Sugar-Sensing Contact Lens

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The Google lab known for working on unusual projects like self-driving cars is crafting a contact lens that could help diabetics manage blood sugar levels.

"We're now testing a smart contact lens that's built to measure glucose levels in tears," project co-founders Brian Otis and Babak Parviz said Thursday in a blog post.

The lens works "using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material," Otis and Parviz said.

They said prototypes have undergone clinical tests and talks were underway with the US Food and Drug Administration. The project was described as being in its early days, and partners were being sought to make the lenses marketplace reality.

"As you can imagine, tears are hard to collect and study," the Google X lab team members said.

"We wondered if miniaturized electronics -- think chips and sensors so small they look like bits of glitter, and an antenna thinner than a human hair -- might be the way to crack the mystery of tear glucose and measure it with greater accuracy."

Prototype lenses being tested at Google X can generate glucose readings about once a second. Researchers are looking into integrating tiny lights that would warn when blood sugar levels go above or below threshold levels, according to the blog post.

"We've always said that we'd seek out projects that seem a bit speculative or strange," Otis and Parviz said. "At a time when the International Diabetes Federation is declaring that the world is 'losing the battle' against diabetes, we thought this project was worth a shot."

Google cited figures indicating that diabetes affects one in every 19 people on the planet.

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Google's New Sugar-Sensing Contact Lens

Thailand-SKKU Nanotechnology Workshop (Jan 15-16, 2014, Thailand Science Park – Video

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Thailand-SKKU Nanotechnology Workshop (Jan 15-16, 2014, Thailand Science Park
The Thailand-SKKU (Sungkyunkwan University) Nanotechnology Workshop opened this morning at Thailand Science Park Convention Center. The two days event is bei...

By: Ramjitti Indaraprasirt

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Thailand-SKKU Nanotechnology Workshop (Jan 15-16, 2014, Thailand Science Park - Video

Nanotechnology News – Nanoscience, Nanotechnolgy, Nanotech News

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New form of quantum matter: Natural 3D counterpart to graphene discovered

The discovery of what is essentially a 3D version of graphene the 2D sheets of carbon through which electrons race at many times the speed at which they move through silicon - promises exciting new things ...

A carbon nanotube sponge capable of soaking up water contaminants, such as fertilisers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, more than three times more efficiently than previous efforts has been presented in a new study published ...

(Phys.org) Rice University scientists have found they can control the bonds between atoms in a molecule.

(Phys.org) Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a robotic "nanobiopsy" system that can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. The single-cell nanobiopsy technique is ...

(Phys.org) North Carolina State University researchers have used silver nanowires to develop wearable, multifunctional sensors that could be used in biomedical, military or athletic applications, including ...

Using an approach akin to assembling a club sandwich at the nanoscale, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have succeeded in crafting a uniform, multi-walled carbon-nanotube-based ...

The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), which uses a fine-tipped probe to scan surfaces at the atomic scale, will soon be augmented with a chemical sensor. This involves the use of a hollow AFM cantilever, through ...

Researchers at the Nanoscience Center (NSC) of University of Jyvskyl in Finland have developed a novel method to study enterovirus structures and their functions. The method will help to obtain new information ...

The semiconductor industry of the future had high expectations of the new material silicene, which shares a lot of similarities with the 'wonder material' graphene. However, researchers of the MESA+ Research ...

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Nanotechnology News - Nanoscience, Nanotechnolgy, Nanotech News

Nanotechnology – Zyvex

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Just give me the FAQ

Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged.

If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond.

If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips.

If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes.

Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like.

In the future, nanotechnology (more specifically, molecular nanotechnology or MNT) will let us take off the boxing gloves. We'll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of nature. This will let us continue the revolution in computer hardware to its ultimate limits: molecular computers made from molecular logic gates connected by molecular wires. This new pollution free manufacturing technology will also let us inexpensively fabricate a cornucopia of new products that are remarkably light, strong, smart, and durable.

"Nanotechnology" has become something of a buzzword and is applied to many products and technologies that are often largely unrelated to molecular nanotechnology. While these broader usages encompass many valuable evolutionary improvements of existing technology, molecular nanotechnology will open up qualitatively new and exponentially expanding opportunities on a historically unprecedented scale. We will use the word "nanotechnology" to mean "molecular nanotechnology".

Nanotechnology will let us:

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Nanotechnology - Zyvex

Nanotechnology: A deeper look at interfaces

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Jan. 15, 2014 "The interface is the device," Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer famously observed, referring to the remarkable properties to be found at the junctures where layers of different materials meet. In today's burgeoning world of nanotechnology, the interfaces between layers of metal oxides are becoming increasingly prominent, with applications in such high-tech favorites as spintronics, high-temperature superconductors, ferroelectrics and multiferroics. Realizing the vast potential of these metal oxide interfaces, especially those buried in subsurface layers, will require detailed knowledge of their electronic structure.

A new technique from an international team of researchers working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) promises to deliver the goods. In a study led by Charles Fadley, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and the University of California Davis, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Physics, the team combined two well-established techniques for studying electronic structure in crystalline materials into a new technique that is optimized for examining electronic properties at subsurface interfaces. They call this new technique SWARPES, for Standing Wave Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy.

"SWARPES allows us for the first time to selectively study buried interfaces with either soft or hard x-rays," Fadley says. "The technique can be applied to any multilayer prototype device structure in spintronics, strongly correlated/high-TC superconductors, or semiconductor electronics. The only limitations are that the sample has to have a high degree of crystalline order, and has to be grown on a nanoscale multilayer mirror suitable for generating an x-ray standing wave."

As the name indicates, SWARPES combines the use of standing waves of x-rays with ARPES, the technique of choice for studying electronic structure. A standing wave is a vibrational pattern created when two waves of identical wavelength interfere with one another: one is the incident x-ray and the other is the x-ray reflected by a mirror. Interactions between standing waves and core-level electrons reveal much about the properties of each atomic species in a sample. ARPES from the outer valence levels is the long-standing spectroscopic workhorse for the study of electronic structure. X-rays striking a material surface or interface cause the photoemission of electrons at angles and kinetic energies that can be measured to obtain detailed electronic energy levels of the sample. While an extremely powerful tool, ARPES, a soft x-ray technique, is primarily limited to the study of near-surface atoms. It's harder x-ray cousin, HARPES, makes use of more energetic x-rays to effectively probe subsurface interfaces, but the addition of the standing wave capability provides a much desired depth selectivity.

"The standing wave can be moved up and down in a sample simply by rocking the angle of incidence around the Bragg angle of the mirror," says Alexander Gray, a former member of Fadley's UC Davis research group and affiliate with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who is now a postdoctoral associate at Stanford/SLAC. "Observing an interface between a ferromagnetic conductor (lanthanum strontium manganite) and an insulator (strontium titanate), which constitute a magnetic tunnel junction used in spintronic logic circuits, we've shown that changes in the electronic structure can be reliably measured, and that these changes are semi-quantitatively predicted by theory at several levels. Our results point to a much wider use of SWARPES in the future for studying the electronic properties of buried interfaces of many different kinds."

Fadley, Gray and their collaborators carried out their SWARPES tests at ALS Beamline 7.0.1. The Advanced Light Source is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national user facility and Beamline 7.0.1 features a premier endstation for determining the electronic structure of metals, semiconductors and insulators. Additional corroborating measurements concerning the interface atomic structure were performed at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), another DOE national user facility hosted at Berkeley Lab.

Results of this study have been published in Europhysics Letters (EPL). The paper is titled "Momentum-resolved electronic structure at a buried interface from soft X-ray standing-wave angle-resolved photoemission." Gray was the lead author, Fadley the corresponding author.

This research was supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.

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Nanotechnology: A deeper look at interfaces


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