Up conversion is an Anti-Stokes luminescent process by which photons of low energy are piled up to generate light at a higher energy. Here we show that the addition of fluoride anions to a D2O solution of a macrocyclic erbium complex leads to the formation of a supramolecular [(ErL)2F](+) assembly in which fluoride is sandwiched between two complexes, held together by the synergistic interactio...

K-Sol, a recently developed corneal storage medium that contains purified chondroitin sulphate in tissue culture medium (TC 199), is capable of preserving corneal tissue for 14 days at 4 degrees C. To study the effect of tissue storage in K-Sol at room temperature we preserved rabbit corneas in K-Sol and M-K medium for three or seven days at 25 degrees C. All of the corneal endothelial sheets w...

Visible room-temperature photoluminescence (PL) was observed from hydrogen-free nanostructured amorphous carbon films deposited by pulsed laser ablation in different background pressures of argon sPArd. By varying PAr from 5 to 340 mTorr, the film morphology changed from smooth to rough and at the highest pressures, low-density filamentary growth was observed. Over the same pressure regime an i...

The optoelectronic applications of Si are restricted to the visible and near-infrared spectral range due to its 1.12 eV-indirect band gap. Sub-band gap light detection in Si, for instance, has been a long-standing scientific challenge for many decades since most photons with sub-band gap energies pass through Si unabsorbed. This fundamental shortcoming, however, can be overcome by introducing n...

Magnetoelectric multiferroics are materials that have coupled magnetic and electric dipole orders, which can bring novel physical phenomena and offer possibilities for new device functions. In this report, single-crystalline Bi(4.2)K(0.8)Fe(2)O(9+δ) nanobelts which are isostructural with the high-temperature superconductor Bi(2)Sr(2)CaCu(2)O(8+δ) are successfully grown by a hydrothermal method....

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as promising candidates for various optoelectronic applications based on their diverse electronic properties, ranging from insulating to superconducting. However, cooperative phenomena such as ferroelectricity in the 2D limit have not been well explored. Here, we report room-temperature ferroelectricity in 2D CuInP2S6 (CIPS) with a transition temperat...

In the single-phase multiferroics, the coupling between electric polarization (P) and magnetization (M) would enable the magnetoelectric (ME) effect, namely M induced and modulated by E, and conversely P by H. Especially, the manipulation of magnetization by an electric field at room-temperature is of great importance in technological applications, such as new information storage technology, fo...

We report ferromagnetism in carbon-doped ZnO. Our first-principles calculations based on density functional theory predicted a magnetic moment of 2.02 mu(B) per carbon when carbon substitutes oxygen in ZnO, and an ferromagnetic coupling among magnetic moments of the carbon dopants. The theoretical prediction was confirmed experimentally. C-doped ZnO films deposited by pulsed-laser deposition sh...

In the past decade, invisible cloaks have experienced rapid research development in the metamaterial community driven by their revolutionary practical potentials. Among them, magnetic cloaks, which are able to conceal metallic or magnetic objects from electromagnetic induction detection, have attracted a great amount of attention. However, applications of these reported devices are limited by t...

The application of masers is limited by its demanding working conditions (high vacuum or low temperature). A room-temperature solid-state maser is highly desirable, but the lifetimes of emitters (electron spins) in solids at room temperature are usually too short (∼ns) for population inversion. Masing from pentacene spins in p-terphenyl crystals, which have a long spin lifetime (∼0.1 ms), has b...