The hardness and virtual incompressibility of diamond allow it to be used in high-pressure anvil cell. Here we report a new way to generate static pressure by encapsulating single-crystal diamond with graphene membrane, the latter is well known for its superior nano-indentation strength and in-plane rigidity. Heating the diamond-graphene interface to the reconstruction temperature of diamond (~...

In this work, we report the development and experimental validation of a coupled statistical thermodynamic model allowing prediction of the structural transitions executed by a novel DNA nanodevice, for quantitative operational design. The efficiency of target structure formation by this nanodevice, implemented with a bistable DNA molecule designed to transform between three distinct structures...

Large-scale, deterministic assembly of nanowires and nanotubes with rationally controlled geometries could expand the potential applications of one-dimensional nanomaterials in bottom-up integrated nanodevice arrays and circuits. Control of the positions of straight nanowires and nanotubes has been achieved using several assembly methods, although simultaneous control of position and geometry h...

Graphene is a room temperature ballistic electron conductor and also a very good thermal conductor. Thus, it has been regarded as an ideal material for postsilicon electronic applications. A major complication is that the relativistic massless electrons in pristine graphene exhibit unimpeded Klein tunneling penetration through gate potential barriers. Thus, previous efforts to realize a field e...

Watching electrons lose steam in graphene Although graphene can be fabricated to be extremely clean, it still has a nonzero electrical resistance. Resistance is associated with turning electrons’ energy into heat, but how exactly does this happen? Halbertal et al. used a tiny scanning temperature probe based on a superconducting quantum interference device to investigate this problem. As the cu...

Trilayer graphene is of particular interest to the 2D materials community because of its unique tunable electronic structure. However, to date, there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the properties of epitaxial trilayer graphene on silicon carbide. Here, following successful synthesis of large-area uniform trilayer graphene, atomic force microscopy (AFM) showed that the trilayer graphe...

We demonstrated a method to construct high efficiency saturable absorbers based on the evanescent light field interaction of CVD monolayer graphene deposited on side-polished D-shaped optical fiber. A set of samples was fabricated with two different core-graphene distances (0 and 1 μm), covered with graphene ranging between 10 and 25 mm length. The mode-locking was achieved and the best pulse d...

We present the preparation of disk-like graphene nanoflakes, highly dispersible in dimethylformamide (DMF), with uniform size and thickness. The preparation procedure includes an overnight mild sonication of natural graphite in DMF, followed by a purification step using ultra-centrifugation. The mean diameter of the as produced well defined round shaped graphene nanoflakes is about 100 nm and t...

We investigate spin conductance in zigzag graphene nanoribbons and propose a spin injection mechanism based only on graphitic nanostructures. We find that nanoribbons with atomically straight, symmetric edges show zero spin conductance but nonzero spin Hall conductance. Only nanoribbons with asymmetrically shaped edges give rise to a finite spin conductance and can be used for spin injection in...

The nucleation path of graphene growth on the Cu(111) surface is investigated by importing carbon atoms step-by-step using density functional theory (DFT) calculations. An overall path of graphene nucleation has been proposed based on configuration and energy analysis. At the very first stage, linear chains will be formed and dominate the copper surface. Then, Y-type (furcate) carbon species wi...