NanoTechnology: Materials, Processes & Devices

Long-term stability of chemiresistive gas sensors is essential for their use in industrial and residential safety and air-quality monitoring systems. Incorporation of noble metals into the gas sensors has been proved to be an effective strategy to enhance their sensitivity and selectivity. However, noble metal particles are prone to poisoning, resulting in catalyst deactivation. Atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts constitute a new class of materials that contains isolated individual atoms or synergistically coupled few-atom ensembles dispersed on, and/or coordinated with...

Black phosphorus (BP) is a promising material for optoelectronic applications due to its direct bandgap at all thicknesses, and low Auger recombination coefficient at high carrier densities. BP, being a two-dimensional material, lacks scalability, for which techniques for its large-area processing are important. In this work, we find methodologies to utilize this material for large-scale optoelectronic applications.

Project currently funded by: Federal

Core/shell quantum dots are known to have high photoluminescence quantum yield for their passivation through thicker shell by suppressing surface trap states. In spite of their excellent exciton dynamics, these bright quantum dots tend to suffer from stability issues and degradation over time. Here we investigate their photo-physical properties due to charge injection, which leads to unfavorable recombination pathways through charged excitons. This provides an additional tuning knob for modulation of their photoluminescence quantum yield after synthesis, thereby offering a means of...

Animal skins often possess both functions of sensing and actuating to detect external stimulations and change shapes when needed, respectively. Furthermore, many animals, such as jellyfish and leptocephalus (eel larvae) have tissues that are transparent and ultra-stretchable, which are difficult to build in synthetic sensors and actuators. Moreover, all these living skins have self-healing properties, i.e. to restore their critical functions after being damaged. On the contrary, artificial electronic systems are often brittle and non-transparent. As such, biomimetic, skin-like materials...