Nanotech Advances May Lead to New Devices

Advances in nanotechnology such as tiny porphyrin tubes to make a broad range of nanodevices, and tiny bioelectronic circuits to make nanotech machines or sensors, could lead to new devices.

Nanotechnology combined with superconductivity could pave the way for ’spintronics’

As the ever-increasing power of computer chips brings us closer and closer to the limits of silicon technology, many researchers are betting that the future will belong to “spintronics”: a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron’s charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron’s intrinsic spin.

If a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins, these researchers argue, spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips–including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations.

Now, University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues believe they have found such a control technique. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation through a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant, was published in the March 5, 2005, edition of the journal Nature.

Nanotech advance makes carbon nanotubes

Researchers have made carbon nanotubes bent in sharp predetermined angles, a technical advance that could lead to use of the long, thin cylinders of carbon as tiny springs, tips for atomic force microscopes, smaller electrical connectors in integrated circuits, and in many other nanotechnology applications.

In a paper published in the April 7, 2005, issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Sungho Jin, a professor of materials science at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, reported a technique to create bent nanotubes by manipulating the electric field during their growth and adjusting other conditions.

Tiny Porphyrin Tubes May Lead to New Nanodevices

Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That’s a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories.

Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That’s a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water.

Scientists Unlock Secrets Behind Nanotube Formation

Nanotubes are ubiquitous in the world of science. Although several methods for making them exist, little is known about how these techniques physically produce the hollow fibers of carbon molecules known as nanotubes, that is until now. A multinational team of scientists has discovered that multi-walled carbon nanotubes made by the pure carbon arc method are, in fact, carbon crystals that form inside drops of glass-coated liquid carbon.