Cellulose nanocrystals obtained from natural sources are of great interest for many applications. In water, cellulose nanocrystals form a liquid crystalline phase whose hierarchical structure is retained in solid films after drying. Although tactoids, one of the most primitive components of liquid crystals, are thought to have a significant role in the evolution of this phase, they have evaded ...

State-of-the-art photovoltaics use high-purity, large-area, wafer-scale single-crystalline semiconductors grown by sophisticated, high-temperature crystal growth processes. We demonstrate a solution-based hot-casting technique to grow continuous, pinhole-free thin films of organometallic perovskites with millimeter-scale crystalline grains. We fabricated planar solar cells with efficiencies app...

The growth of exchange-biased MnPd/Fe bilayers has been investigated using x-ray diffraction. The bilayers were deposited on MgO(001) substrates in an ultrahigh-vacuum ion-beam sputter system. It was found that the orientation of the MnPd unit cell and the crystalline quality could be controlled as a function of the deposition temperature. Twinned a-axis oriented MnPd films are obtained below 1...

The 2D electron gas at the polar/non-polar oxide interface has become an important platform for several novel oxide electronic devices. In this paper, the transport properties of a wide range of polar perovskite oxide ABO3/SrTiO3 (STO) interfaces, where ABO3 includes LaAlO3, PrAlO3, NdAlO3, NdGaO3 and LaGaO3 in both crystalline and amorphous forms, were investigated. A robust 4 unit cell (uc) c...

Graphene nucleation from crystalline Ni3C has been investigated using quantum chemical molecular dynamics (QM/MD) simulations based on the self-consistent-charge density-functional tight-binding (SCC-DFTB) method. It was observed that the lattice of Ni3C was quickly relaxed upon thermal annealing at high temperature, resulting in an amorphous Ni3C catalyst structure. With the aid of the mobile ...

Germanium is an extremely important material used for numerous functional applications in many fields of nanotechnology. In this paper, we study the crystallization of amorphous Ge using atomistic simulations of critical nano-metric nuclei at high temperatures. We find that crystallization occurs by the recurrent transfer of atoms via a diffusive process from the amorphous phase into suitably-o...

Crystalline Co nanoparticles were hybridized with single-crystalline Bi nanowires simply by annealing Co-coated Bi nanowires at elevated temperatures. An initially near-amorphous Co film of 2-7 nm in thickness began to disrupt its morphology and to be locally transformed into crystallites in the early stage of annealing. The Co film became discontinuous after prolonged annealing, finally leadin...