The mechanical behavior of bicrystalline aluminum nano-pillars under uniaxial compression reveals size effects, a stochastic stress– strain signature, and strain hardening. Pillar diameters range from 400 nm to 2 lm and contain a single, non-sigma high angle grain boundary oriented parallel to the pillar axes. Our results indicate that these bicrystalline pillars are characterized by intermitte...

In this study, an integrated approach was used for the preparation of a nanotitanium-based bioactive material. The integrated approach included three methods: severe plastic deformation (SPD), chemical etching and atomic layer deposition (ALD). For the first time, it was experimentally shown that the nature of the etching medium (acidic or basic Piranha solutions) and the etching time have a si...

A comparison has been drawn in pure anatase and rutile forms of TiO2 films with their respective nano crystalline forms as photoanodes in dye-sensitized solar cells. All the films have been synthesized by using sol-gel method. Crystalline nature of the films has been investigated by x-ray diffraction (XRD) and morphologies have been studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The short-circu...

Progresses in the design of well-defined electronic band structure and dedicated functionalities rely on the high control of complex architectural device nano-scaled structures. This includes the challenging accurate description of strain fields in crystalline structures, which requires non invasive and three-dimensional (3D) imaging methods. Here, we demonstrate in details how x-ray Bragg ptyc...

Nano-silicon is a nanostructured material in which quantum or spatial confinement is the origin of the material's luminescence. When nano-silicon is broken into colloidal crystalline nanoparticles, its luminescence can be tuned across the visible spectrum only when the sizes of the nanoparticles, which are obtained via painstaking filtration methods that are difficult to scale up because of low...

Calcified coccolithophores generate calcium carbonate scales around their cell surface. In light of predicted climate change and the global carbon cycle, the biomineralization ability of coccoliths has received growing interest. However, the underlying biomineralization mechanism is not yet well understood; the lack of non-invasive characterizing tools to obtain molecular level information invo...

The structural and magnetic properties of Co68Fe24Zr8/Al2O3 multilayers grown by using magnetron sputtering were investigated with x-ray reflectivity, transmission electron microscopy and magneto-optical Kerr effect. The Co68Fe24Zr8 form amorphous islands when the nominal thickness of the Co68Fe24Zr8 layers is 10 Å, exhibiting an isotropic superparamagnetic behavior. Continuous layers with most...