The optical properties of a concentric nanometer-sized spherical shell comprised of an (active) 3-level gain medium core and a surrounding plasmonic metal shell are investigated. Current research in optical metamaterials has demonstrated that including lossless plasmonic materials to achieve a negative permittivity in a nano-sized coated spherical particle can lead to novel optical properties s...

Progresses in the design of well-defined electronic band structure and dedicated functionalities rely on the high control of complex architectural device nano-scaled structures. This includes the challenging accurate description of strain fields in crystalline structures, which requires non invasive and three-dimensional (3D) imaging methods. Here, we demonstrate in details how x-ray Bragg ptyc...

The utilisation of plasmonic effects in metallic nanostructures is gaining importance for applications in molecular sensing. Of special interest is the local field enhancement effect, which enables surface-enhanced Raman scattering and significantly boosts the sensitivity of the Raman technique. For in vivo biological research, the ability to excite the resonance of localised surface plasmon-po...

Self-assembly of biological molecules on solid materials is central to the "bottom-up" approach to directly integrate biology with electronics. Inspired by biology, exquisite biomolecular nanoarchitectures have been formed on solid surfaces. We demonstrate that a combinatorially-selected dodecapeptide and its variants self-assemble into peptide nanowires on two-dimensional nanosheets, single-la...

The preparation of novel NIR fluorescent carbon based nanomaterials, consisting of boron difluoride azadipyrromethene fluorophores covalently attached to carbon nano-onions, is demonstrated. In addition, the analysis of the new nanomaterial is presented. The fluorescent nano-derivative properties are customized such that their emission can be reversibly on/off modulated in response to pH, which...

Nanocrystalline metals have excellent strength due to the high density of grain boundaries inside. However, these same boundaries lead to limited thermal stability and a tendency to fail in a brittle manner, issues which limit the practical usage of these materials. Most strategies for stabilization of nano-grains against coarsening rely on the idea of using segregating dopants to lower excess ...

A magnetic nanoparticle catalyst was readily prepared from inexpensive starting materials which catalyzed the Hantzsch reaction. High catalytic activity and ease of recovery from the reaction mixture using an external magnet, and several reuse times without significant losses in performance are additional eco-friendly attributes of this catalytic system.

The in-situ nano-crystal-to-crystal transformation (SCCT) synthesis provides a powerful approach for tailoring controllable feature shapes and sizes of nano crystals. In this work, three nitrogen-rich energetic nano-crystals based on 5,5'-azotetrazolate(AZT2-) Cr(III) salts were synthesized by means of SCCT methodology. SEM and TEM analyses show that the energetic nano-crystals feature a compos...

Nanoscale disorder results in severe spectral misalignment of silicon microring resonators and Mach-Zehnder interferometers. We correct for such effects using electric-field-induced waveguide nano-oxidation, demonstrating a tuning wavelength range of several nanometers and 0.002 nm resolution without line shape degradation. Field-induced nano-oxidation is a permanent and precise technique and r...