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Self-organized construction of advanced materials and devices has been carried out starting with tailor-made colloidal nanoparticles as building blocks. Multilayer thin films of gold nanoparticles stabilized by glutamates and zinc sulfide nanoparticles capped with chitosan were self-organized by a modified polyelectrolyte deposition process. Resistive current-voltage characteristic was observed in devices (less than 50 layers). The conduction onset in thicker devices (>50 layers) was found to be at applied voltages of ∼1.6, ∼1.94, and ∼2.79 V for 75, 100, and 150 layer structures, respectively. Devices exhibit similar behavior in forward and reverse biases and the electrical characteristics were repeatable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphene is a two-dimensional material with a capability of gas sensing, which is here shown to be drastically improved by inducing gentle disorder in the lattice. We report that by using a focused ion beam technique, controlled disorder can be introduced into the graphene structure through Ga+ ion irradiation. This disorder leads to an increase in the electrical response of graphene to NO2 gas molecules by a factor of three in an ambient environment (air). Ab initio density functional calculations indicate that NO2 molecules bind strongly to Stone–Wales defects, where they modify electronic states close to the Fermi level, which in turn influence the transport properties. The demonstrated gas sensor, utilizing structurally defected graphene, shows faster response, higher conductivity changes and thus higher sensitivity to NO2 as compared to pristine graphene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A combination of electron beam lithography, photolithography and focused ion beam milling was used to create a nanogap platform, which was bridged by gold nanoparticles in order to make electrical measurements and assess the platform under ambient conditions. Non-functionalized electrodes were tested to determine the intrinsic response of the platform and it was found that creating devices in ambient conditions requires careful cleaning and awareness of the contributions contaminants may make to measurements. The platform was then used to make measurements on octanethiol (OT) and biphenyldithiol (BPDT) molecules by functionalizing the nanoelectrodes with the molecules prior to bridging the nanogap with nanoparticles. Measurements on OT show that it is possible to make measurements on relatively small numbers of molecules, but that a large variation in response can be expected when one of the metal-molecule junctions is physisorbed, which was partially explained by attachment of OT molecules to different sites on the surface of the Au electrode using a density functional theory calculation. On the other hand, when dealing with BPDT, high yields for device creation are very difficult to achieve under ambient conditions. Significant hysteresis in the I-V curves of BPDT was also observed, which was attributed primarily to voltage induced changes at the interface between the molecule and the metal.