Directly coupling two closely located nanoscale sensors

Coupled oscillations

02-Dec-2019 - They look like toothpicks, but much, much smaller: 10,000 times shorter and 1,000 times thinner. The research team around physicist Professor Eva Weig succeeded in constructing nanopillars so closely together that they can be coupled via the strain field and succinctly oscillate together. This ...

Fish-inspired material changes color using nanocolumns

22-Mar-2019 - Inspired by the flashing colors of the neon tetra fish, researchers have developed a technique for changing the color of a material by manipulating the orientation of nanostructured columns in the material. "Neon tetras can control their brightly colored stripes by changing the angle of tiny ...

Meta-surface corrects for chromatic aberrations across all kinds of lenses

Single-layer surface of nanostructures can be incorporated into commercial optical systems

23-Nov-2018 - Today's optical systems -- from smartphone cameras to cutting-edge microscopes -- use technology that hasn't changed much since the mid-1700s. Compound lenses, invented around 1730, correct the chromatic aberrations that cause lenses to focus different wavelengths of light in different spots. ...

Combining metalens with an artificial muscle

27-Feb-2018 - Inspired by the human eye, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed an adaptive metalens, that is essentially a flat, electronically controlled artificial eye. The adaptive metalens simultaneously controls for three of the major ...

The first nanometrically-sized superelastic alloy

14-Jun-2017 - UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country's researchers have explored superelasticity properties on a nanometric scale based on shearing an alloy's pillars down to nanometric size. The researchers have found that below one micron in diameter the material behaves differently and requires much ...

Flat lens opens a broad world of color

10-Feb-2017 - Last summer, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) announced a new, flat lens that could focus light with high efficiency within the visible spectrum. The lens used an ultrathin array of nanopillars to bend and focus light as it passed. The ...

Self-assembly approach to engineer nanoscale metamaterials

09-Jan-2017 - A research team has developed a novel self-assembly approach to fabricate nanoscale metamaterials made of metallic nanopillars in oxide matrices. This method enables control over the density, size, and alignment of nanopillars instead of a random distribution of particles in the oxide matrix. ...

Whispering gallery modes in Silicon nanocones intensify luminescence

30-Nov-2015 - Silicon, a semiconducting material, reveals new talents when reduced to nanoscopic dimensions. A joint team at the HZB Institute of Nanoarchitectures for Energy Conversion and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) has demonstrated this. Silicon nanocones generate 200 times as ...

Patterning oxide nanopillars at the atomic scale by phase transformation

19-Oct-2015 - Researchers at Tohoku University's Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) have carried out a collaborative study aimed at precisely controlling phase transformations with high spatial precision, which represents a significant step forward in realizing new functionalities in confined ...

Flexible supercapacitor raises bar for volumetric energy density

Could be woven into clothes to power wearable medical, communications devices

13-May-2014 - Scientists have taken a large step toward making a fiber-like energy storage device that can be woven into clothing and power wearable medical monitors, communications equipment or other small electronics. The device is a supercapacitor—a cousin to the battery. This one packs an interconnected ...