Nano- and micro- fibers of conjugated polymer semiconductors are particularly interesting both for applications and for fundamental research. They allow an investigation into how electronic properties are influenced by size confinement and chain orientation within microstructures that are not readily accessible within thin films. Moreover, they open the way to many applications in organic elect...

In recent years, polymer nano-composites (PNCs) have increasingly gained more attention due to their improved mechanical, barrier, thermal, optical, electrical and biodegradable properties in comparison with the conventional micro-composites or pristine polymers. With a modest addition of nanoparticles (usually less than 5wt. %), PNCs offer a wide range of improvements in moduli, strength, heat...

Micro and nano-scale hydrogel lines can be fabricated on substrates by top-down approaches such as lithography and micro/nano-imprint. When in contact with a solvent, the hydrogel lines swell under the constraint of the substrate, often resulting in distorted shapes or instability patterns. In this paper, using a nonlinear finite element method, the effects of material and geometry on swell ind...

Coordination polymer particles have attracted a great deal of attention due to their characteristic properties and diverse applications in the fields of gas storage, catalysis, optics, sensing, electronics, photochemistry, and biology. Herein, we investigated shape transformation reactions of zinc 5, 10, 15, 20-tetra(4-pyridyl)-21 H, 23 H-porphine (ZnTPyP)-containing coordination polymer partic...

Polymer-stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystals (PSFLCs) are made by photopolymerizing 3% reactive mesogenic monomer on a quasi bookshelf texture of a ferroelectric liquid crystal (FLC). We observe the formation of nano-scaled polymer fibrils templated by the two dimensionally ordered host. The polymer fibrils capture the orientation of the host with thin polymer fibrils interweaving the smect...

Nano-crystalline Si films with high conductivities are highly desired in order to develop the new generation of nano-devices. Here, we first demonstrate that the grain boundaries played an important role in the carrier transport process in un-doped nano-crystalline Si films as revealed by the temperature-dependent Hall measurements. The potential barrier height can be well estimated from the ex...

A significant amount of academic and industrial research efforts are devoted to the encapsulation of active substances within microor nanocarriers. The ultimate goal of core–shell systems is the protection of the encapsulated substance from the environment, and its controlled and targeted release. This can be accomplished by employing “stimuli-responsive” materials as constituents of the capsul...

Nano-dispersions of perfluorocarbon (PFC) or PFC emulsions are substitutes of erythrocytes. They perform the function of the gas transport on condition when the particle structure will be preserved. The invariable values of the size and surface properties of the spherical PFC particles characterize the stability of their structure. The stable nano-dispersion on base PFC and phospholipids (PL) a...

We present a newly designed polymer light-emitting diode with a bandwidth of ~350  kHz for high-speed visible light communications. Using this new polymer light-emitting diode as a transmitter, we have achieved a record transmission speed of 10  Mb/s for a polymer light-emitting diode-based optical communication system with an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technique, matching the p...

Packaging and interconnect technologies are critical to the advancement of micro-scale and nano-scale systems. This paper will review some examples of our studies on flip-chip assembly, solder self-assembly, automated tuning and fixing, flexible circuits, atomic layer deposition and liquid crystal polymer for manufacturable and reliable microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In addition, we wil...