Month: August 2011

The University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW) Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Nanostructured Interfaces hosted two national events for museum educators at the Madison Children’s Museum and on the UW campus. The first event, held February 28 – March 2, was a professional development workshop for partners of the Nanoscale Informal Science …

Nanostructures are extremely sensitive to their surface properties. In the past year we have made extensive measurements of thin silicon films in ultra-high vacuum. We now have strong evidence that ultra-thin silicon with a 2×1 surface reconstruction is heavily influenced by the surface pi* band. Fig. A shows experimental measurements (black squares) of the conductance …

  Semiconductor Nanomembrane Tubes: Three-Dimensional Confinement for Controlled Neurite Outgrowth (2011) In many neural culture studies, neurite migration on a flat, open surface does not reflect the three-dimensional (3D) microenvironment in vivo. With that in mind, we fabricated arrays of semiconductor tubes using strained silicon (Si) and germanium (Ge) nanomembranes and employed them as a …

The overall interest in graphene as a material for devices has led to tremendous advances in the knowledge of transport in graphene. However, there are still questions about the intrinsic limit to electron mobility. Recent experiments have demonstrated mobility greater than 107 cm2/Vs at 50 K temperature, exceeding previous theoretical predictions of the intrinsic mobility …

Mechanisms of Organic/Inorganic Interface Formation (2011) Advanced organic/inorganic materials for applications including solar energy conversion and optoelectronics require the creation of interfaces with carefully controlled structural and electronic properties. Functional monolayers at these interfaces can have associated electronic states or dipole moments and thus provide a new degree of control over device properties. IRG 2 …

Top: The kinetics of charge transfer from a rhenium-bypyridine complex to a TiO2 , measured for several molecular linkers (purple, black, red, and blue traces). Insets show the structure of the molecular systems, and infrared spectroscopy demonstrating the attachment of Re1C to TiO2. Bottom: Calculated transition densities associated with the 1MLCT excited state (left, shown …