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Starting from stratification of alternating thin films of Si and ZnO produced by sputtering technique, followed by an annealing process at a sufficiently low temperature (560 °C) under vacuum (10–4 mbar), we were able to form crystalline nano-aggregates of Si and ZnO in a dielectric matrix of zinc silicate and silicon oxide. The grain size of the Si crystallites depended on the Si/ZnO ratio in the starting material and on the annealing duration. Materials with tuned band gaps have been produced (© 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Summary: In an attempt to investigate new polymeric materials as constituents of an e-nose we focus our attention on a new emerging class of versatile three-dimensional polyhedral silicon polymers, called polysilsesquioxanes, containing nanosized inorganic cages. Such hybrid amphiphilic materials offer exceptional opportunities to create composites with singular properties. In particular we found that the polyhedral organosilsesquioxane (POSS) cages covalently attached to the polymer backbone as side-chain act as an “internal” filler with a nanometric homogeneous dispersion. We show how it is possible to fabricate sensing devices based on selected POSS matrix and, by a suitable choice of other “external” home-made fillers, (e.g. graphite, copper, silicon, zinc and their alloys) obtained by mechanical milling the response of the resulting composites towards different classes of compounds can be tuned. In particular we fabricated a new high sensitive relative humidity device, exhibiting a fivefold response change for relative humidity changing in the range 0% to 100%. This behaviour can not be modelled on the basis of the matrix swelling operating mechanism. Rather, the combined effect of the matrix and the filler has to be invoked in order to explain the formation of nanopores inside the material that are responsible of the porous behavior of our sensors.