New insights into understanding and controlling the intriguing phenomena of spontaneous merging (kissing) and the self-assembly of monolithic Y- and T-junctions is demonstrated in the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition growth of GaAs nanowires. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy for determining polar facets was coupled to electrostatic-mechanical modeling and position-control...

A new type of nanohybrids containing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and CdSe quantum dots (QDs) was prepared using an electrostatic self-assembly method. The CdSe QDs were capped by various mercaptocarboxylic acids, including thioglycolic acid (TGA), dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA) and mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA), which provide shell thicknesses of ~5.2, 10.6 and 15.2 Å, respectively. The surface-modified...

Developing effective and versatile photocatalytic systems is of great potential in solar energy conversion. Here we investigate the formation of supramolecular catalysts by electrostatic self-assembly in aqueous solution: Combining positively charged porphyrins with negatively charged polyelectrolytes leads to nanoscale assemblies where, next to electrostatic interactions, π–π interactions also...

Self organization of large-scale structures in nature - either coherent structures like crystals, or incoherent dynamic structures like clouds - is governed by long-range interactions. In many problems, hydrodynamics and electrostatics are the source of such long-range interactions. The tuning of electrostatic interactions has helped to elucidate when coherent crystalline structures or incohere...

Although one dimensional (1D) Pt nanostructures with well-defined sizes and shapes have fascinating physiochemical properties, their preparation remains a great challenge. Here we report an easy and novel synthesis of 1D Pt nanostructures with controllable morphologies, through the combination of designer self-assembling I3K and phage-displayed P7A peptides. The nanofibrils formed via I3K self-...

This work deals with the short-time effective diffusion coefficient of charged and uncharged liposomes, measured ~as a function of the volume fraction! using fiber optic dynamic light scattering. Particularly, we are interested in the interplay between electrostatic and hydrodynamic interactions on the diffusion of these lipid vesicles. Regarding the charged liposome, it has been found that the...

In this paper, we introduce a microfluidic-based self-excited energy conversion system inspired by Kelvin's water dropper but driven by inertia instead of gravity. Two micro water jets are produced by forcing water through two micropores by overpressure. The jets break up into microdroplets which are inductively charged by electrostatic gates. The droplets land on metal targets which are gradua...

We show that the ionic environment plays a critical role in determining the configurational properties of DNA confined in silica nanochannels. The extension of DNA in the nanochannels increases as the ionic strength is reduced, almost tripling over two decades in ionic strength for channels around 100 x 100 nm in dimension. Surprisingly, we find that the variation of the persistence length alon...

This article studied static deflection, natural frequency and nonlinear vibration of a clamped-clamped microbeam under discontinues electrostatic actuation. The electrostatic actuation was induced by applying AC-DC voltage between the microbeam and electrode plate. In contrast to previous works, it was assumed that length of the electrode plate was smaller than that of the microbeam. In additio...

Piezoelectric-based shunt dampers are developed in recent years because of simplicity in comparison with other methods. In these methods, a part of converted mechanical energy is stored in the internal el...