By employing mixed inorganic precursors and finely tuning the ageing conditions, crack-free surfactant-templated mesoporous titania films of thickness up to 4 mm have been obtained efficiently. Low angle XRD and TEM show that the mesostructure of the multilayered films was maintained when calcined at the developed temperature of 350 uC, but those films developed crystallinity. A novel type of m...

The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and the failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well before the failure. For this we impose an homogeneous stress on a granular material, and measure local deformations for very small strain increments using...

Superconductors with periodically ordered mesoporous structures are expected to have properties very different from those of their bulk counterparts. Systematic studies of such phenomena to date are sparse, however, because of a lack of versatile synthetic approaches to such materials. We demonstrate the formation of three-dimensionally continuous gyroidal mesoporous niobium nitride (NbN) super...

Ordered porous materials with unique pore structures and pore sizes in the mesoporous range (2-50 nm) have many applications in catalysis, separation and drug delivery. Extensive research has resulted in mesoporous materials with one-dimensional, cage-like and bi-continuous pore structures. Three families of bi-continuous mesoporous materials have been made, with two interwoven but unconnected ...

In pursuit of photorealistic rendering of surface material, Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) has been used frequently in recent years. Its main drawback is its massive data size. To solve this, the Spatial Bidirectional Reflectance Function (SBRDF) techniques compress BTFs into reflectance model parameters. However, SBRDF cannot produce the self-shadowing and self-occlusion mesostructure ef...

Thermoresponsive nanocomposite thin films composed of alternating layers of silica and polymerized N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM) or NIPAM plus dodecyl methacrylate (DM) hydrogels were prepared by surfactant-directed evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA). During EISA, the organic monomers partition within the hydrophobic domains of a lamellar mesophase. In-situ polymerization via a free radic...

Oriented mesostructured surfactant-silica nanocomposite thin films with a 2D hexagonal mesostructure of cylindrical micelles were prepared by evaporation-induced self-assembly using two different nonionic Brij surfactants and studied by small-angle X-ray scattering in symmetric reflection (SRSAXS) and grazing incidence (GISAXS) geometries. A novel SRSAXS evaluation approach was applied that all...

Recently we have investigated the formation of novel thick, solid, mesostructured films of polymer/surfactant mixtures which form spontaneously at the air-solution interface. Here we report studies of the effect of adding a series of sparingly soluble species to the precursor solution, to alter the mesostructure of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide/polyethylenimine films and to investigate the inc...

Ordered mesoporous, crystalline MgTa(2)O(6) thin films with a mesoscopic nanoarchitecture were synthesized by evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) in combination with a sol-gel procedure. Utilization of novel templates, namely the block copolymers KLE (poly(ethylene-co-butylene)-b-poly(ethylene oxide)) and PIB6000 (CH(3)C(CH(3))(2)(CH(2)C(CH(3))(2))(107)CH(2)C(CH(3))(2)C(6)H(4)O(CH(2)CH(2)O...

In case that some crystallites in the material under study are greater than, say, ten micrometers, the diffraction lines become spotty and the information on the size, shape, orientation and various structural defects of these crystallites can be inferred by measuring x-ray diffraction images from individual crystallites. In our contribution, we refer to a number of cases where we managed to ge...