From Photonics Online, March 27, 2012, Source - Optical Materials Express, Vol. 2, Issue 4, pp. 478-489 (2012), Titanium nitride as a plasmonic material for visible and near-infrared wavelengths, by Gururaj V. Naik, Jeremy L. Schroeder, Xingjie Ni, Alexander V. Kildishev, Timothy D. Sands, and Alexandra Boltasseva
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OME.2.000478, : 

 

"Helping bridge the gap between photonics and electronics, researchers from Purdue University have coaxed a thin film of titanium nitride into transporting plasmons, tiny electron excitations coupled to light that can direct and manipulate optical signals on the nanoscale. Titanium nitride's addition to the short list of surface-plasmon-supporting materials, formerly comprised only of metals, could point the way to a new class of optoelectronic devices with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

  

'We have found that titanium nitride is a promising candidate for an entirely new class of technologies based on plasmonics and metamaterials," said Alexandra Boltasseva, a researcher at Purdue and an author on a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optical Materials Express. "This is particularly compelling because surface plasmons resolve a basic mismatch between wavelength-scale optical devices and the much smaller components of integrated electronic circuits.'" 

Link to paper in OSA's Optical Materials Express: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ome/abstract.cfm?uri=ome-2-4-478 

 

Source: Read the full article...

Photonics Online: http://www.photonicsonline.com/doc.mvc/Researchers-Discover-A-New-Path-For-Light-0001?sectionCode=News&templateCode=EnhancedStandard&user=2506668&source=nl:33583

Image:  Alexandra Boltasseva, Purdue University/Optical Materials Express.   

From IEEE Spectrum, April 2012, by Neil Savage: "Graphene has become the darling of the postsilicon crowd in the eight years since Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated it by ripping Scotch tape off a chunk of graphite. But there are other two-dimensional nanowonders. Molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), which can be pulled off a block of molybdenite through the same process, could offer new approaches to making high-speed logic circuits-on its own or in combination with graphene.

  

"We spent the last seven, eight years looking at how to make transistors out of graphene," Geim says. "But there was an elephant in the room-that you can't really switch off current in graphene."

Graphene's single atomic layer of carbon atoms allows electricity to flow rapidly, promising circuits that work far faster than silicon transistors. But it lacks a bandgap, meaning that it's hard to shut off the flow, making the on and off states of digital logic nearly impossible. Several approaches-using nanoribbons, quantum dots, or double layers of graphene-have been tried, but they are difficult, poorly developed, and tend to undermine the speed advantage."

IEEE Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/nanotechnology/graphenes-new-rival 

Image: Wikipedia

From Solid State Technology, March 19, 2012: "University of Texas at Austin researchers demonstrated high-quality, wafer-scale graphene deposition on evaporated copper films, using an AIXTRON cold-wall vertical BM (Black Magic) Pro reactor. The BM Pro is a high-performance, flexible chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processing platform with high uniformity. Also read: AIXTRON deposition tools installed at graphene research lab in Italy Using a lower processing temperature than that needed for graphene synthesis on copper foil, the researchers deposited monolayer graphene chemical with negligible defects onto evaporated copper films on the wafer-scale.

"A pre-annealing process is used at first to create a hydrogen-rich polycrystalline copper film of <111> preferential orientation, followed by the decomposition of pure methane for the growth of high quality graphene. The growth proceeds without the need for hydrogen gas during the growth phase, and occurs at a lower processing temperature than on copper foil," said Prof. Deji Akinwande, who led this research together with Prof. Rod Ruoff's team at the Microelectronics Research Center at UT Austin." 

  

From RenewableEnergyWorld.com, April 5, 2012, by Victor Cardona:  "Clean Energy Patents hit a record high in 2011, up 450 patents relative to 2010 according to the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index. GE took the yearly Clean Energy Patent Crown from GM in 2011 while also leading the Wind and Solar sectors and making the annual top ten in hybrid/electric vehicles. U.S. patent owners hold more U.S. patents than any other country. Also, solar and wind patents continued their rise to pull away from the lower tier of CEPGI sectors while fuel cells continued to lead."  

 

"The CEPGI tracks the granting of patents in the Clean Energy sector and monitors important technological breakthroughs in this field." 

 

From Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), March 30, 2012:  "Eighteen leading industrial and research partners have joined forces in an EU Fast Track project aiming to further refine this technology. In the next three years, it is planned to produce a marketable prototype with an efficiency of twelve percent. The project is coordinated by Forschungszentrum Jülich and funded to the tune of € 9.3 million by the EU."

"In the Fast Track project, leading representatives from research and industry who previously pursued different technologies are now pooling their expertise in order to combine the best components. By harmonizing and optimizing different approaches, a new generation of thin-film silicon solar modules will be created with an efficiency of twelve percent. This corresponds to an increase of twenty percent and under test conditions the costs should amount to less than € 0.5 per watt nominal power."

Source: Read the full article... 

Forschungszentrum Jülich: http://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN/2012/12-03-28Kickoff_FastTrack.html
Image: Forschungszentrum Jülich

From Photonics Spectra, April 2012, by Melinda A. Rose: "A $55 million photonics center that was expected to break ground on the University of Ottawa campus in March will help fulfill the school's goal to make Ottawa the global hub of photonics.

The five-story Centre for Advanced Photonics and Environmental Analysis (CAPEA) will house specialized labs and equipment and will attract the world's outstanding researchers in the fields, said university President Allan Rock. The center will also house Canada's only accelerator mass spectrometer for conducting research in photonics and environmental analysis.

On May 2010, $10 million in government funding allowed the university to recruit quantum optics and photonics pioneer Robert W. Boyd as its inaugural Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics. Boyd was wooed from the University of Rochester, where he had worked for more than 30 years."

Source: Read the full article...

Photonics Spectra: http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=50514

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Feb 21, 2012,  : "Solar cells, light emitting diodes, displays and other electronic devices could get a bump in performance because of a discovery at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that establishes new boundaries for controlling band gaps.

While complex transition metal oxides have for years held great promise for a variety of information and energy applications, the challenge has been to devise a method to reduce band gaps of those insulators without compromising the material's useful physical properties.

 

The band gap is a major factor in determining electrical conductivity in a material and directly determines the upper wavelength limit of light absorption. Thus, achieving wide band gap tunability is highly desirable for developing opto-electronic devices and energy materials."

 

Source: Read the full article...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20120221-00

Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

From MIT News, April 19, 2012, by Ann Trafton:  "Every year, more than a million Americans receive an artificial hip or knee prosthesis. Such implants are designed to last many years, but in about 17 percent of patients who receive a total joint replacement, the implant eventually loosens and has to be replaced early, which can cause dangerous complications for elderly patients.

To help minimize these burdensome operations, a team of MIT chemical engineers has developed a new coating for implants that could help them better adhere to the patient's bone, preventing premature failure."

"The new coating consists of a very thin film, ranging from 100 nanometers to one micron, composed of layers of materials that help promote rapid bone growth. One of the materials, hydroxyapatite, is a natural component of bone, made of calcium and phosphate. This material attracts mesenchymal stem cells from the bone marrow and provides an interface for the formation of new bone. The other layer releases a growth factor that stimulates mesenchymal stem cells to transform into bone-producing cells called osteoblasts."

Source: Read the full article...

MIT News: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/hip-implants-nanoscale-coating-0419.html 

Image: Hammond Lab