The authors performed bronchoscopic examination using an ultrathin bronchoscope to determine the characteristics of the peripheral airways in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The study population comprised 13 healthy control subjects, 10 patients with chronic bronchitis without airflow limitation, and 20 patients with COPD. The COPD patients were divided clinically into 10 with chr...

We systematically investigate the design of two-dimensional silver (Ag) hemisphere arrays on crystalline silicon (c-Si) ultrathin film solar cells for plasmonic light trapping. The absorption in ultrathin films is governed by the excitation of Fabry-Perot TEMm modes. We demonstrate that metal hemispheres can enhance absorption in the films by (1) coupling light to c-Si film waveguide modes and ...

We demonstrate the confinement of acoustic phonons in ultrathin silicon layers and study its effect on electron mobility. We develop a model for confined acoustic phonons in an ideal single-layer structure and in a more realistic three-layer structure. Phonon quantization is recovered, and the dispersion relations for distinct phonon modes are computed. This allows us to obtain the confined pho...

Low temperature mobility measurements of silicon-on-insulator ~SOI! metal-oxidefield-effect-transistors are reported. The batch of devices fabricated in this work includes both ultrathin and thick devices for which the SOI film thicknesses are in the ranges of 10–15 nm and 56–61 nm, respectively. The 4.2 K peak mobility of the thick devices is 1.9 m/V s. The ultrathin devices show mobility degr...

Driven by the development of high-performance piezoelectric materials, actuators become an important tool for positioning objects with high accuracy down to nanometer scale, and have been used for a wide variety of equipment, such as atomic force microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy. However, positioning at the subatomic scale is still a great challenge. Ultrathin piezoelectric material...

Conventional gastroscopes have a diameter of 8.8-12 mm; ultrathin endoscopes have an outer diameter of 5.3-5.9 mm. We share our experience with 50 patients who underwent transnasal esophagogastroduodenoscopy using an ultrathin endoscope. The indications included endoscopyassisted nasogastric tube placement in 25 patients, tight lesions not negotiable with conventional endoscope in 9, restricted...

OBJECTIVE The most common complication of intrauterine tracheal balloon occlusion is the preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) which increases the rate of neonatal morbidity and mortality. Ultrathin fetoscopy may be a method of reducing the risk of PPROM. MATERIALS AND METHODS The operation was performed at the 27th week of gestation after sedation and relaxation of a fetus with bila...

A new type of light trapping structure utilizing ring-shaped metallic nanocavity arrays is proposed for the absorption enhancement in ultrathin solar cells with few photonic waveguide modes. Dozens of times of broadband absorption enhancement in the spectral range of 700 to 1100 nm is demonstrated in an ultrathin Si3N4/c-Si/Ag prototype solar cell by means of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD...

Double emulsions with a hierarchical core-shell structure have great potential in various applications, but their broad use is limited by their instability. To improve stability, water-in-oil-in-water (W/O/W) emulsions with an ultrathin oil layer of several hundred nanometres were produced by using a microcapillary device. The effects of various parameters on the generation of ultrathin-shell d...

″Ultrathin″ metallization layers on the order of nanometers in thickness are increasingly used in semiconductor interconnects and other nanostructures. Aqueous deposition methods are attractive methods to produce such layers due to their low cost, but formation of ultrathin layers has proven challenging, particularly on oxide-coated substrates. This work focused on the formation of thin copper ...