Greetings!
Our edition of nanotimes is live now at:
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This is our comprehensive summer double edition with a great number of industry and research news. One focus is on environmental technologies (pages 60, 76). We also included the last report by Cientifica (Global Nanotechnology Funding 2011, page 101) that shows for nanotech the US is still the place to be although China and Russia are increasingly attractive. The number of news on GRAPHENE is quite striking. That opens up the possibility for a replace-ment of e.g. silicon. Even if graphene still is a very special material it will slowly develop into a "standard" material like the nanotubes.
Both Europe and the US have solved their financial problems on short notice. Geoffrey T. Smith comments in Wall Street Journal* and gets to the heart of the problem: "The U.S. government has addressed a short-term liquidity problem, rather than a long-term solvency one. ... global investors are still more likely to cut more slack to Washington than to Europe going forward."
However, the problems are just postponed into the future. What else can politicians do in order to prevent the total collapse? If the European governments, headed by Merkel in Germany and Sarkozy in France, seriously stick to the Euro then they won't go past a currency reform. Such a reform would be less problematic than running it down and driving the Euro project against the wall. With saving measures only you can't reduce debts in a one- to two-digit trillion range. That is unrealistic.
A continuous and regular European transfer union from the North to the South would have the consequence that the currently ruling parties in Europe would lose their voters to right-wing parties. Both Christian and Social Democrats aren't interested in that scenario.
One more important final note: Nanotimes Magazine affiliates receive a SPECIAL DISCOUNT for the Silicon Executive 2011 on September 08, 2011: ENTER PROMO CODE: NTM090811. Topics are Memory 2020, Equipment 2020, R&D 2020 and Industry Landscape 2020: http://www.siliconexecutive2011.com
If we can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Best Regards,
Thomas Ilfrich
*Geoffrey T. Smith: U.S. Deal: Short-Term Gain, Long-Term Pain, In: Wall Street Journal, The Source, 08/01/2011.
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Heated AFM Tip Allows Plastic and CMOS-Compatible
Direct Fabrication of Ferroelectric Piezoelectric Structures [13]
Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, have developed a new way to fabricate nanometer-scale ferroelectric structures directly on flexible plastic substrates that would be unable to withstand the processing temperatures normally required to create such nanostructures.
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Companies - [16]
3M Accelrys, Inc.
Advanced Cell Technology
Advanced Diamond Technologies
Agilent Technologies
AkzoNobel
Alcoa / RUSNANO
Alexium International
ALPS ELECTRIC EUROPE
GmbH offers with the
AMCOL International Corporation
AMRI / Proteros
Antisense Pharma
Aspen Aerogels / BASF Venture Capital
AIXTRON
austriamicrosystems
Bayer MaterialScience
Beneq / LUT
BioForce Nanosciences Holdings
BioSante Pharmaceuticals
Cabot Corporation
Cambridge NanoTech
CEA-Leti/
CVD Equipment Corporation / Replisaurus Technologies
dilitronics
Dow Chemical Company
DuPont
Dyesol
Flamel Technologies
Fluidigm Corporation / Life Technologies
Forth Dimensions Displays / Kopin
GE
GigOptix
Gigaphoton
GT Solar International
IBM
imec / ASML
Indel Therapeutics
Industrial Nanotech
Infineon Technologies
Illumina
Keithley Instruments
MagForce Nanotechnologies
Mekoprint and Risø DTU
Merck / Nano-C
Micralyne
Modumetal
Nanometrics
nanoMR
Nanonics Imaging
Nano Retina
NanoViricides
National Semiconductor
NEOLUX and CEA-Leti
Nitto Denko/Hydranautics and Statkraft
NeoPhotonics
Novaled
Oerlikon
Oxford Advanced Surfaces Group
PerkinElmer
Plasma-Therm
Photronics
Princeton Power Systems (PPS)
Roche Applied Science
Spire Corporation
Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC)
Starpharma Holdings
Tegal Corporation
TESCAN Thin Film Electronics ASA
Tronics
Ultratech
Veeco Instruments
WITec
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New Test Measures Key Properties of
Polymer Thin Films and Membranes [58]
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a measurement technique that reliably determines three fundamental mechanical properties of near-nanoscale films.
The technique, which highlights the challenge of making mechanical measurements on an object with at least one dimension comparable to the size of a virus, should enable better design and engineering for a variety of thin-film technologies, particularly reverse-osmosis membranes for water purification.
Reverse-osmosis membranes, explains NIST researcher Chris Stafford, are an interesting challenge for the materials scientist. The membranes are used in water purification systems - a polyamide film no more than 200 nanometers thick backed by a thicker, porous support layer.
Water holding dissolved salts or other contaminants is forced against one side of the membrane at substantial pressures up to about a thousand psi (roughly 7 megapascal), and comes out the other side leaving most of the impurities behind. The mechanical integrity of the membrane is obviously essential - it can't tear or develop pinhole leaks under the pressure - but engineers lacked a good way to measure the strength and breaking point, under stress, of these extremely thin films.
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New Electronics Material Closer to Commercial Reality [67]
Researchers have developed a method for creating single-crystal arrays of a material called graphene, an advance that opens up the possibility of a replacement for silicon in high-performance computers and electronics. The new findings represent an advance toward perfecting a method for manufacturing large quantities of single crystals of the material, similar to the production of silicon wafers.
"Graphene isn't there yet, in terms of high quality mass production like silicon, but this is a very important step in that direction," said Yong P. Chen, corresponding author for the new study and Miller Family Assistant Professor of Nanoscience and Physics at Purdue University, USA.
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Arrays of Indefinitely long Uniform Nanowires and Nanotubes [68]
Researchers at Bilkent University, Turkey, present in Nature Materials arrays of indefinitely long uniform nanowires and nanotubes.
They report a new thermal size-reduction process to produce well-ordered, globally oriented, indefinitely long nanowire and nanotube arrays with different materials.
The new technique involves iterative co-drawing of hermetically sealed multimaterials in compatible polymer matrices similar to fibre drawing. Globally oriented, endlessly parallel, axially and radially uniform semiconducting and piezoelectric nanowire and nanotube arrays hundreds of metres long, with nanowire diameters less than 15nm, are obtained.
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Berkeley Scientists Pioneer Nanoscale
Nuclear Materials Testing Capability [72]
Scientists at Berkeley Lab, the University of California at Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory have devised a nanoscale testing technique for irradiated materials that provides macroscale materials-strength properties. This technique could help accelerate the development of new materials for nuclear applications and reduce the amount of material required for testing of facilities already in service.
"Nanoscale mechanical tests always give you higher strengths than the macroscale, bulk values for a material. This is a problem if you actually want to use a nanoscale test to tell you something about the bulk-material properties," said Andrew Minor, a faculty scientist in the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) and an associate professor in the materials science and engineering department at UC Berkeley.
"We have shown you can actually get real properties from irradiated specimens as small as 400 nanometers in diameter, which really opens up the field of nuclear materials to take advantage of nanoscale testing."
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Berkeley Lab Scientists Find Unique Luminescence in Tetrapod Nanocrystals [74]
The research team of Paul Alivisatos at the University of California (UC, USA) Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has created artificial molecules of semiconductor nanocrystals and watched them break a fundamental principle of photoluminescence known as "Kasha's rule."
Named for chemist Michael Kasha, who proposed it in 1950, Kasha's rule holds that when light is shined on a molecule, the molecule will only emit light (fluorescence or phosphorescence) from its lowest energy excited state. This is why photoluminescent molecules emit light at a lower energy than the excitation light. While there have been examples of organic molecules, such as azulene, that break Kasha's rule, these examples are rare. Highly luminescent molecular systems crafted from quantum dots that break Kasha's rule have not been reported - until now.
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| Nanowire-based Sensors Offer Improved Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds [76]
A team of researchers from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), George Mason University and the University of Maryland has made nano-sized sensors that detect volatile organic compounds - harmful pollutants released from paints, cleaners, pesticides and other products - that offer several advantages over today's commercial gas sensors, including low-power room-temperature operation and the ability to detect one or several compounds over a wide range of concentrations.
The recently published work is proof of concept for a gas sensor made of a single nanowire and metal oxide nanoclusters chosen to react to a specific organic compound. This work is the most recent of several efforts at NIST that take advantage of the unique properties of nanowires and metal oxide elements for sensing dangerous substances.
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Best Regards
IVCON-Team
phone: +49(0)30 48492774
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