New angle for optical memories
The medium is made of nanocrystals of zinc sulphide doped with samarium. Although the nanocrystals are only 3 nanometres long, they clump together into larger particles to form a powder that can be us...
Quantum dots become more ‘atom-like’
Banin and co-workers used quantum dots made of indium arsenide, covered with a nonconducting barrier of hexane dithiol molecules and linked to a conducting gold film. The radius of the nearly spherica...
Nanotubes and supercurrents
The fantastic progress in the miniaturization of electronic devices that has taken place in the past few decades has largely been made possible by perfecting a century-old technique called lithography...
Nanotubes muscle in on ‘smart materials’
The new technique works because the salt water conducts electricity. As the voltage on the tape changes, electrical charge carriers are injected into the nanotubes. These form electrolyte ions near th...
Bucky ball memories
Buckyballs, nanotubes and related structures have great potential for storage applications because their small size offers the possibility of high switching speeds and low power consumption. However, ...
Nanotubes grow up
The technique uses an iron-silica catalyst created by coating a quartz plate with an iron-silica solution. Once the solution dries it cracks into a film 30-50 microns thick. After the substrate is hea...
Nanotubes for the Mass Market
Carbon nanotubes – which can be thought of as a rolled-up graphite sheet – were discovered in 1991. One way to produce large quantities of nanotubes is to place two water-cooled carbon ele...
Nanotransistors at room temperature
The biggest challenge in making a single-molecule device is achieving electrical contact between individual molecules. Now new techniques that vaporize carbon to form nanotubes, and deposit material o...
Read article: Carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes
Theory suggests that carbon nanotubes have a variety of useful properties, and experiments to test these predictions are just becoming possible
Carbon-based electronics
In addition to being very strong and flexible, carbon nanotubes also have unusual electronic properties. Nanotubes are described by two numbers, conventionally m and n, and a specific nanotube can be ...
