Flexible photonic crystals are attractive devices owing to their multifold tunable parameters additionally introduced by soft substrates or by nanostructured, nano-doped, or nano-embedded soft matters. This not only extends significantly the intrinsic functions of photonic crystals, but also facilitates easy integration of the photonic crystal device into various optoelectronic and sensing syst...

Vibrational spectroscopy, which is considered one of the most definitive means of obtaining chemical bonding information, often has a low measurement sensitivity preventing its application to the study of interfaces and monolayers. Surface plasmons induced on metal nano-particles by electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) can be used to enhance the sensitivity and spatial resolution (below the o...

Studying the properties of structures where at least one spatial dimension is on the nanometer scale is motivated by many factors from engineering (such as the semiconductor industry’s push towards higher density integrated circuits), chemistry (developing methods to produce particles of well controlled size and structure), biology (using DNA to control the self-assembly of small structures) an...

Shear-banding is commonly regarded as the "plasticity carrier" of metallic glasses (MGs), which usually causes severe strain localization and catastrophic failure if unhindered. However, through the use of the high-throughput dynamic nanoindentation technique, here we reveal that nano-scale shear-banding in different MGs evolves from a "distributed" fashion to a "localized" mode when the result...

Al-doped ZnO (AZO) thin films with various Al concentrations were synthesized on Si(001) substrates with native oxide layers by atomic layer deposition process. The effects of the Al concentration on the microstructural characteristics of the AZO thin films grown at 250 degrees C and the correlation between their microstructural characteristics and electrical properties of the AZO thin films we...

One fundamental yet longstanding issue in materials science is how local inelasticity arises within an amorphous structure before yielding occurs. Although many possible scenarios were postulated or predicted by theories and simulations,however, direct experimental evidence has been lacking today due to the lack of a sensitive way to detect nano-scale inelasticity. Through the carefully designe...

Metallic nano-particle pairs in close proximity to one another display surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Single-molecule detection has been predicted to be possible thanks to SERS. The SERS enhancement can be maximized by simultaneously increasing the curvature of the particles and bringing them into close proximity to one another. The field intensity has been predicted to increase expo...

Plasmonic nano-apertures are commonly used for the detection of small particles such as nanoparticles and proteins by exploiting electrical and optical techniques. Plasmonic nanopores are metallic nano-apertures sitting on a thin membrane with a tiny hole. It has been shown that plasmonic nanopores with a given geometry identify internal molecules using Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS...

Bimetallic catalysts (Co:Mo ≈ 2:1 in atomic ratio) were prepared on quartz substrates from metal acetate solutions using a procedure of dip coating, followed by calcination and reduction. High-purity single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) 1–2 nm in diameter were grown densely (~1.0×10 17 m-2) and vertically on these substrates during an alcohol catalytic chemical vapor deposition process. To cl...

Metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs or NTs) are the ideal nanometer-scale wire, as they can withstand current densities up to 2 to 3 orders of magnitude higher than copper currently used in electronic chips [1]. These conductive NTs can be utilized as nano-electrodes to electrically contact another nanoscale object, such as a single semiconductor quantum dot (QD) or metallic nanopart...