Well-defined organic nanostructures with controllable size and morphology are increasingly exploited in optoelectronic devices. As promising building blocks, porphyrins have demonstrated great potentials in visible-light photocatalytic applications, because of their electrical, optical and catalytic properties. From this perspective, we have summarized the recent significant advances on the des...

Controlled preparation of inorganic nanostructures on substrates is very important for various applications of functional inorganic nanomaterials. Dip-pen nanolithography (DPN), as an atomic force microscopy (AFM) based technique, can directly fabricate nanostructures with precise position and morphology control on the nanometer scale and meanwhile image the produced nanostructures in situ at h...

Three-dimensional nanostructures can be fabricated by the glancing angle deposition technique. By rotating the substrate in both polar and azimuthal directions, one can fabricate desired nanostructures, such as nanorod arrays with different shapes, nanospring arrays, and even multilayer nanostructures. This method offers a fully three-dimensional control of the nanostructure with additional cap...

Owing to their inherent tortuosity, the collective height of vertically aligned nanostructures does not equal the average length of the individual constituent nanostructures, and therefore temporal height measurement is not an accurate measure of the genuine growth kinetics. We use high-resolution spatial mapping of alignment by small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) to transform real-time measure...

We have investigated two complementary nanostructures, nanocavity and nanopillar arrays, for light absorption enhancement in depleted heterojunction colloidal quantum dot (CQD) solar cells. A facile complementary fabrication process is demonstrated for patterning these nanostructures over the large area required for light trapping in photovoltaic devices. The simulation results show that both p...

One-dimensional (1D) ferroelectric nanostructures, such as nanowires, nanorods, nanotubes, nanobelts, and nanofibers, have been studied with increasing intensity in recent years. Because of their excellent ferroelectric, ferroelastic, pyroelectric, piezoelectric, inverse piezoelectric, ferroelectric-photovoltaic (FE-PV), and other unique physical properties, 1D ferroelectric nanostructures have...

Carbon nanostructures-including graphene, fullerenes, etc.-have found applications in a number of areas synergistically with a number of other materials. These multifunctional carbon nanostructures have recently attracted tremendous interest for energy storage applications due to their large aspect ratios, specific surface areas, and electrical conductivity. This succinct review aims to report ...

Nanomaterials and nanostructures exhibit unique size-tunable and shape-dependent physicochemical properties that are different from those of bulk materials. Advances of nanomaterials and nanostructures open a new door to develop various novel biosensors. The present work has reviewed the recent progress in electrochemical, surface plasmon resonance (SPR), surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS...

DNA based spherical nanostructures are one of the promising nanostructures for several biomedical and biotechnological applications due to their excellent biocompatibility and DNA-directed surface addressability. Herein, we report the synthesis and amphiphilicity-driven self-assembly of two classes of DNA (hydrophilic)-chromophore (hydrophobic) hybrid amphiphiles into spherical nanostructures. ...

An ITO substrate with periodic surface nanostructures was used to induce strong diffusion and diffraction of incident light. The nanostructures were fabricated using nanoimprint lithography on photoresist followed by coating of the ITO layer and organic materials with uniform morphology. The nanostructures embedded into the ITO layer were found to increase absorption in poly(3-hexylthiophene):[...