• An Anti-Glare, Anti-Reflective Display for Mobile Devices

---

•  Peeling Back the Layers of Thin Film Structure and Chemistry

---

•  Simulations for Better Transparent Oxide Layers

---

• A Look Inside SLAC's Battery Lab

---

• Photorealistic Plasmonic Printing with Aluminum Nanostructures

---

• Rice Rolls 'Neat' Nanotube Fibers

---

• Will Quantum Dots Dominate Displays?

---

• Simulating the Invisible

---

• The Power of Hidden Patterns

---

•  Database Accelerates the Development of New Materials

---

• Biomimetic Photodetector Sees in Color

---

•  Solar Modules Embedded in Glass

An Anti-Glare, Anti-Reflective Display for Mobile Devices

The single-walled carbon nanotubes in new fibers created at Rice line up like a fistful of uncooked spaghetti through a process designed by chemist Angel Martí and his colleagues. The tricky bit, according to Martí, whose lab reported its results this month in the journal ACS Nano, is keeping the densely packed nanotubes apart before they're drawn together into a fiber.  

" Quantum dots are being used in mass-produced displays for the consumer market, including such items as Sony flat-screen televisions and Amazon.com's Kindle Fire HDX e-reader. And the field is still rapidly growing and evolving.

While quantum dots can emit a very narrow range of wavelengths, the light source they are converting from can have a broader range and the light will still be converted with an efficiency of more than 95 percent.

Market research firm IHS projects that the market for displays that incorporate quantum dots will grow from about US $10 million in 2013 to $200 million by 2020. And according to Touch Display Research, the quantum-dot materials market is projected to grow from $70 million in 2013 to $9.6 billion in 2023."

"Panagiotis Grammatikopoulos, Nanoparticles by Design Unit, Okinawa Institute of Technology, simulates the interactions of particles that are too small to see, and too complicated to visualize. In order to study the particles' behavior, he uses a technique called molecular dynamics. This means that every trillionth of a second, he calculates the location of each individual atom in the particle based on where it is and which forces apply. He uses a computer program to make the calculations, and then animates the motion of the atoms using visualization software. The resulting animation illuminates what happens, atom-by-atom, when two nanoparticles collide. Mr. Grammatikopoulos simulated palladium nanoparticles colliding and fusing at different temperatures. He determined that each time the particles fused, their atoms would start to crystallize into orderly rows and planes."

"Patterned surfaces are all the rage among researchers seeking to induce surfaces to repel water or adhere to other things, or to modify materials' electrical properties.

Now materials scientists at MIT have added a new wrinkle to research on the patterning of surfaces: While most research has focused on patterns on the outer surfaces of materials, Michael Demkowicz and his team in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) have begun to explore the effects of patterned surfaces deep within materials - specifically, at the interfaces between layers of crystalline materials.

Their results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, show that such control of internal patterns can lead to significant improvements in the performance of the resulting materials." 

Reprinted with permission of MIT News (

"Researchers at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a database that takes some of the guesswork out of designing new materials. The team performed systematic analyses of both known and imagined chemical compounds to find their key properties and established a database of the results. Called the Open Quantum Materials Database (OQMD), it launched in November and is the largest database in the world of its kind. 

So far, the OQMD contains analyses of 285,780 compounds and continues to grow. The OQMD allows users to search for materials by composition, create phase diagrams, determine ground state compositions, and visualize crystal structures. Unlike other similar databases, the OQMD is completely open to the public." 

"Rice University researchers have created a CMOS-compatible, biomimetic color photodetector that directly responds to red, green and blue light in much the same way the human eye does.

The new device was created by researchers at Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) and is described online in a new study in the journal Advanced Materials. It uses an aluminum grating that can be added to silicon photodetectors with the silicon microchip industry's mainstay technology, "complementary metal-oxide semiconductor," or CMOS.

The color photodetector uses a combination of band engineering and plasmonic gratings, comb-like aluminum structures with rows of parallel slits. Using electron-beam evaporation, which is a common technique in CMOS processing, researchers deposited a thin layer of aluminum onto a silicon photodetector topped with an ultrathin oxide coating." 

"Organic solar modules have advantages over silicon solar cells. However, one critical problem is their shorter operating life. Researchers at Fraunhofer IAP are working on a promising solution: they are using flexible glass as a carrier substrate that better protects the components.

They are embedding the solar modules in a thin layer of glass. Glass is not only the ideal encapsulating material; it also tolerates process temperatures of up to 400 degrees. A specialized glass from Corning Inc. is being employed in the research work. Thanks to its special physical properties, layers can be made that are only 100 micrometers thick. The special glass is not only fracture-resistant and extremely strong; it is so flexible that it can be gently bowed even in its solid form. The researchers in cooperation with their partner Corning have already created the first working OPVs with this material by processing stacks sheet-by-sheet. The goal is to fabricate these modules in rolls as well."