Nanostructuring boron-rich materials should significantly impact their thermal and electrical transport properties. Nonetheless, nanostructured monoliths of such could not be achieved in the 10 nm range so far, because large temperatures required to synthesize produce compounds. Such a nanostructuration may have important consequences for achieving trade-off between enhanced low conductivity ma...

There is increasing interest in self-assembled materials for energy storage, flexible electronics and hydrophobic barriers. Inorganic/organic hybrid thin films and especially organosilane-based coatings already have demonstrated their ability to achieve those goals. However, some fundamental points of their formation process by molecular self-assembly remain unexplained. Although the literature...

The term “nanocomposite” is widely employed to describe an extremely broad range of materials, where one of the components has a dimension in the sub-micron scale. A better –and far more restrictive– definition would require that a true nanocomposite should be a fundamentally new material (hybrid) in which the nanometer scale component or structure gives rise to intrinsically new properties, wh...

in this investigation, hydroxyapatite (hap) nanostructure with uniform morphologies, controllable size, nano-dispersion and narrow-size distribution in diameter has been synthesized successfully by low-temperature hydrothermal process, and the as-synthesized powders were characterized by energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron mi...

Engineering the electromagnetic environment in a nanostructure to study single electron tunneling

JUNE 2009 | VOLUME 12 | NUMBER 6 28 The selfand directed assembly of materials has been of considerable interest for a number of years, however only recently has it become possible to program structure and properties on the nanoscale with the precision required for a number of important applications. It is now possible to define, with nanometer accuracy, the complete 3D structure of functional ...

A new method for the growth of nanoporous thin films is described. The process is targeted to the formation of titanium dioxide (TiO2) through a low-temperature inorganic-filler chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. The growth technique employs gas-phase reaction of an alkali metal (Na) and a metal halide (TiCl4) and subsequent thin film growth within a low-pressure coflow diffusion reactor....

A current challenge of physical, chemical, and engineering sciences is to develop theoretical tools for predicting structure and properties of complex materials from the knowledge of a few input parameters. In this work, we present a general multiscale molecular simulation protocol for predicting morphologies and properties of nanostructured polymer systems and we apply it to three examples of ...

In the field of nanotechnology, the use of various biological units instead of toxic chemicals for the reduction and stabilization of nanoparticles, has received extensive attention. Among the many possible bio resources, biologically active products from fungi and yeast represent excellent scaffolds for this purpose. Since fungi and yeast are very effective secretors of extracellular enzymes a...