Naga bhasma is one of the herbo-metallic preparations used in Ayurveda, a traditional Indian System of Medicine. The preparation of Naga bhasma involves thermal treatment of 'Naga' (metallic lead) in a series of quenching liquids, followed by reaction with realgar and herbal constituents, before calcination to prepare a fine product. We have analysed the intermediates obtained during different ...

This work reviews different types of substrates used for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) that have been developed in the last 10 years. The different techniques of self-assembly to immobilize metallic nanoparticles on solid support are covered. An overview of SERS platforms developed using nanolithography methods, including electron-beam (e-beam) lithography and focused ion beam (FIB) ...

By one-step pyrolysis of a unique "cage-in-cage" cobalt metal-organic framework, nitrogen-doped carbon cubes embedded with numerous metallic Co nanoparticles were obtained. A considerable amount of Co particles was encapsulated in thin carbon shells and formed the core-shell-like Co@C structure. With about 60 wt% Co particles in the prepared sample, the nanocomposites of Co nanoparticles and ni...

Photoacoustic nanometrology using coherent extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light detection is a unique and powerful tool for probing ultrathin films with a wide range of mechanical properties and thicknesses well under 100 nm. In this technique, short wavelength acoustic waves are generated through laser excitation of a nano-patterned metallic grating, and then probed by diffracting coherent EUV beam...

We describe a new synthetic approach to heterogeneous metal-TiO(2) nanomaterials based on conversion of Ti(3+) to hydrous TiO(2) occurring uniquely on the nanostructured metallic surfaces such as Pt, Au, and Ni nanowires and nanoparticles. The TiO(2) growth mechanism was studied by designing an electrochemical cell. A variety of heterogeneous metal-TiO(2) nanostructures, such as segmented meta...

Metallic nanoparticles have huge applications in all the fields including agriculture and its allied sciences. This study aims at evaluating possible implications of iron oxide nanoparticles on the growth and development of rice (Oryza sativa L.). Rice is feeding hunger of half of the World’s population and yet found to be highly sensitive towards iron deficiency especially at seedling stage. T...

CuO is an attractive anode material for Li-ion batteries because of its high specific capacity. However, conventional CuO powders suffer from a large volume expansion during the Li insertion–extraction process, resulting in contact loss between the active material and the current collector. In this work, a nano-architecture made of metallic Cu core–CuO shell nanocable arrays is fabricated direc...

We show that nano-scale variations of the order parameter in strongly-correlated systems can induce local spatial regions such as domain walls that exhibit electronic properties representative of a different, but nearby, part of the phase diagram. This is done by means of a Landau-Ginzburg analysis of a metallic ferromagnetic system near an antiferromagnetic phase boundary. The strong spin grad...

Separation of metallic and semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) is of great importance for SWCNT-based nano-electronics. We propose a tandem extraction strategy for efficient separation of different types of SWCNTs. This strategy is based on chiral angle discriminated adsorption of soluble condensed benzenoid aromatic molecules on SWCNTs, which induce different dispersibility ...

The appearance of stripe phases is a characteristic signature of strongly correlated quantum materials, and its origin in phase-changing materials has only recently been recognized as the result of the delicate balance between atomic and mesoscopic materials properties. A vanadium dioxide (VO2) single crystal is one such strongly correlated material with stripe phases. Infrared nano-imaging on ...