IEEE Nanotechnology Council
Advancing Nanotech for Humanity
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NANO BLOG

June 22, 2020 – Comb on a Chip: New Design for ‘Optical Ruler’

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
June 22, 2020

Just as a meter stick with hundreds of tick marks can be used to measure distances with great precision, a device known as a laser frequency comb, with its hundreds of evenly spaced, sharply defined frequencies, can be used to measure the colors of light waves with great precision.

Small enough to fit on a chip, miniature versions of these combs — so named because their set of uniformly spaced frequencies resembles the teeth of a comb — are making possible a new generation of atomic clocks, a great increase in the number of signals traveling through optical fibers, and the ability to discern tiny frequency shifts in starlight that hint at the presence of unseen planets. The newest version of these chip-based “microcombs,” created by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), is poised to further advance time and frequency measurements by improving and extending the capabilities of these tiny devices.

The newly developed microcomb technology can help enable engineers and scientists to make precision optical frequency measurements outside the laboratory, said NIST scientist Gregory Moille. In addition, the microcomb can be mass-produced through nanofabrication techniques similar to the ones already used to manufacture microelectronics.

Read complete article at NIST here.

February 24, 2020 – Simple Retrofit Transforms Ordinary Electron Microscopes Into High-Speed Atom-Scale Cameras

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
February 24, 2020

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators have developed a way to retrofit the transmission electron microscope — a long-standing scientific workhorse for making crisp microscopic images — so that it can also create high-quality movies of super-fast processes at the atomic and molecular scale. Compatible with electron microscopes old and new, the retrofit promises to enable fresh insights into everything from microscopic machines to next-generation computer chips and biological tissue by making this moviemaking capability more widely available to laboratories everywhere.

“We want to be able to look at things in materials science that happen really quickly,” said NIST scientist June Lau. She reports the first proof-of-concept operation of this retrofitted design with her colleagues in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments. The team designed the retrofit to be a cost-effective add-on to existing instruments. “It’s expected to be a fraction of the cost of a new electron microscope,” she said.

Read full article at NIST here.

August 31, 2017 – Photon-triggered nanowire transistors are reported in Nature Nanotechnology

Kim et al., recently reported on photon-triggered nanowire (NW) transistors, a new step toward optical computing. These devices consist of crystalline silicon (CSi) NWs that include (PSi) segments in the middle and electrical contacts at both ends of the NW. The PSi acts as a reservoir and supplies carriers to the CSi channel when is exposed to light. It allows for an on/off ratio as high as 8×106. Based on this method authors also demonstrated photon-triggered logic gates and a sub-micron resolution photodetector system.

To read more: https://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2017.153.html
(Contents prepared by Dr. Noelia Vico Trivino and posted by Jr-Hau (JH) He)

 

August 31, 2017 – Nanophotonic Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) transducers enable chemical composition and thermal conductivity measurements at the nanoscale

A near-field cavity optomechanics readout concept has been integrated with picogram-scale probes to realize fully functional AFM detection. This allows achieving high temporal resolution (<10 ns) and picometer vertical displacement uncertainty simultaneously, breaking the trade-off between AFM measurement precision and ability to capture transient events.

Adapted with permission from Nano Lett., Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b02404. Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society.

To read more: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b02404
(Contents prepared by Dr. Noelia Vico Trivino and posted by Jr-Hau (JH) He)

February 23, 2016 – Microtubules propelled by surface-adhered kinesin motors perform biocomputationAn international team of researchers has made a breakthrough in the field of biocomputation.

By exploiting microtubules propelled by surface-adhered kinesin motors as motile nanoscale agents capable of performing basic computations, the subset sum problem was solved in a highly parallel approach. For more information, see Nicolau Jr. et al. in the Early Access Section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Henry

To read more: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/02/17/1510825113
(Contents prepared by H. Hess and posted by Y. Tzeng.)