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Engineering the nucleation and growth of plasmonic metals (Ag and Au) on their pre-existing seeds is expected to produce nanostructures with unconventional morphologies and plasmonic properties that may find unique applications in sensing, catalysis, and broadband energy harvesting. Typical seed-mediated growth processes take advantage of the perfect lattice match between the deposited metal and seeds to induce conformal coating, leading to either simple size increases (e.g., Au on Au) or the formation of core-shell structures (e.g., Ag on Au) with limited morphology change. In this work, we show that the introduction of a thin layer of metal with considerable lattice mismatch can effectively induce the nucleation of well-defined Au islands on Au nanocrystal seeds. By controlling the interfacial energy between the seed and the deposited material, the oxidative ripening, and the surface diffusion of metal precursors, we can regulate the number of islands on the seeds and produce complex Au nanostructures with morphologies tunable from core-satellites to tetramers, trimers, and dimers. This surface engineering strategy is of great significance in nanomaterial synthesis as it is general and can be used to create secondary structures of many other nanocrystals in a controllable manner.

Nanocomposites containing FeS as catalyst and MoS2 as cocatalyst have been synthesized toward efficient heterogeneous Fenton reaction. The deposition of FeS nanoparticles in situ on the surface of MoS2 nanosheets creates strong contact between the two components and generates a large number of exposed Mo6+ sites and sulfur vacancies, which contribute to the enhanced degradation rate by accelerating Fe3+/Fe2+ cycling and ensuring rapid electron transfer. In addition, the MoS2/FeS nanocomposite catalysts exhibit the best performance at near-neutral conditions (pH 6.5), which solves the challenges in conventional Fenton reactions such as leaching of metal ions, the formation of iron slurry, and the need of adjusting solution pH. Further, the nanocomposite can maintain high efficiency after many recycling experiments. It is believed that the MoS2/FeS nanocomposite represents an efficient heterogeneous Fenton catalyst that can greatly promote the performance of advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) for solving practical environmental issues.

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging uses photon-phonon conversion for high-resolution tomography of biological tissues and functions. Exogenous contrast agents are often added to improve the image quality, but the interference from endogenous molecules diminishes the imaging sensitivity and specificity. We report a background-free PA imaging technique based on the active modulation of PA signals via magnetic alignment of Fe

Summary Controllable assembly of molecular and nanoscale building blocks into uniform superstructures up to bulk dimensions remains a key challenge in the next phase of nanotechnology development. Here, we report the self-assembly of superstructures at all scales by taking advantage of the partial miscibility of water and 1-butanol to generate transient aqueous emulsion droplets that can encapsulate the target materials and introduce them into template holes. Further diffusion of water into 1-butanol depletes the emulsion droplets, assembling the building blocks into one well-defined superstructure in each hole. Superstructuring of various types and shapes of nanoparticles, biomolecules, and inorganic compounds could be achieved without the need for surfactants and chemical modifications. The versatility, scalability, low-cost, and accurate positioning are crucial advantages for the future development of advanced precision manufacturing.

Conventional templating synthesis confines the growth of seeds in rigid spaces to achieve faithful morphological replication. Herein, we explore the use of spherical shape-deformable polymeric nanoshells to regulate the anisotropic growth of Ag nanoplates. The flexible shells deform adaptively to accommodate the initial overgrowth of the seeds but restrict the growth in the directions where the shells are fully stretched, eventually producing nanoplates with an unconventional circular profile. The diameter of the final Ag nanoplates can be precisely predicted by stretching and flattering the nanoshells into a plate-like capsule while retaining their original internal surface area. Furthermore, unlike conventional templates, the polymer shells eventually turn themselves into a conformal coating that binds to the surface of the full-grown Ag nanoplates and significantly enhances their stability against oxidative etching.

The unprecedented development of inorganic nanostructure synthesis has paved the way toward their broad applications in areas such as food science, agroforestry, energy conversion, and biomedicine. The precise manipulation of the nucleation and subsequent growth has been recognized as the central guiding principle for controlling the size and morphology of the nanostructures. However, conventional colloid syntheses based on direct precipitation reactions still have limitations in their versatility and extendibility. The crystal structure of a material determines the limited number of possible morphologies that its nanostructures can adopt. Further, as nucleation and growth kinetics are sensitive to not only the nature of the precipitation reactions but also ligands and ripening effect, rigorous control of reaction conditions must be established for every specific synthesis. In addition, multiple experimental parameters are entangled with each other, thereby requiring rigorous control of all reaction conditions. As a result, it is usually challenging to extend a synthetic recipe from one material to another. As an alternative method, the direct transformation of existing nanostructures into target ones has become an effective and robust approach capable of creating various complex nanostructures that are otherwise challenging to obtain using conventional methods. To this end, an in-depth understanding of nanoscale transformation toward the synthesis of inorganic nanostructures with diverse properties and applications is highly desirable.In this Account, we aim to reveal the critical effect of the interfacial diffusion on controlled nanoscale transformation. We first discuss how the interdiffusion rates determine the morphology and properties of bimetallic nanostructures. While equal interdiffusion rates lead to perfect mixing and generate fully alloyed nanostructures, interdiffusion at unequal rates creates vacancies in the fast diffusion side, which may cause dramatic morphological transformation to the nanostructures. Then, we introduce interfacial reactions, including the Kirkendall cavitation process, elimination reaction, and solid-state reaction, to promote the unbalanced interdiffusion and generalize nanoscale transformations in materials of various compositions, morphologies, and crystal structures. Finally, we discuss the use of capping ligands to inhibit the diffusion of atoms on one side of the interface in order to enable selective etching or transformation of the nanostructures. By modifying the nanostructured surface with specific capping ligands, the diffusion of surface atoms is restricted. When nanoparticles undergo chemical reactions (such as etching or heating), the outward diffusion of substances dominates, thereby successfully achieving chemical and morphological transformations. We believe that controlled interfacial diffusion can effectively manipulate nanoscale transformations, thus providing new strategies for the custom synthesis of multifunctional nanomaterials for various specific applications.

The slow kinetics at the cathode of oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) seriously limits the efficiencies of fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Pt, the state-of-the-art ORR electrocatalyst, suffers from high cost, low earth abundance, and poor stability. Here a self-templated strategy based on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) is proposed for the fabrication of hollow nitrogen-doped carbon spheres that are embedded with cobalt nanoparticles (Co/HNC). The Co/HNC manifests better ORR activities, methanol tolerance, and stability than commercial Pt/C. The high ORR performance of Co/NHC can be attributed to the hollow structure which provides enlarged electrochemically active surface area, the formation of more Co-N species, and the introduction of defects. This work highlights the significance of rational engineering of MOFs for enhanced ORR activity and stability and offers new routes to the design and synthesis of high-performance electrocatalysts.

International audience; Over the last three decades, photonic crystals (PhCs) have attracted intense interests thanks to their broad potential applications in optics and photonics. Generally, these structures can be fabricated via either ‘‘top-down’’ lithographic or ‘‘bottom-up’’ self-assembly approaches. The self-assembly approaches have attracted particular attention due to their low cost, simple fabrication processes, relative convenience of scaling up, and the ease of creating complex structures with nanometer precision. The self-assembled colloidal crystals (CCs), which are good candidates for PhCs, have offered unprecedented opportunities for photonics, optics, optoelectronics, sensing, energy harvesting, environmental remediation, pigments, and many other applications. The creation of high-quality CCs and their mass fabrication over large areas are the critical limiting factors for real-world applications. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art techniques in the self-assembly of colloidal particles for the fabrication of large-area high-quality CCs and CCs with unique symmetries. The first part of this review summarizes the types of defects commonly encountered in the fabrication process and their effects on the optical properties of the resultant CCs. Next, the mechanisms of the formation of cracks/defects are discussed, and a range of versatile fabrication methods to create large-area crack/defect-free twodimensional and three-dimensional CCs are described. Meanwhile, we also shed light on both the advantages and limitations of these advanced approaches developed to fabricate high-quality CCs. The self-assembly routes and achievements in the fabrication of CCs with the ability to open a complete photonic bandgap, such as cubic diamond and pyrochlore structure CCs, are discussed as well. Then emerging applications of large-area high-quality CCs and unique photonic structures enabled by the advanced self-assembly methods are illustrated. At the end of this review, we outlook the future approaches in the fabrication of perfect CCs and highlight their novel real-world applications.

We report the unconventional space-free confined growth of Au nanoshells with well-defined plasmonic properties and active tuning of their plasmon coupling by the nanoscale magnetic assembly. The seeded growth of Au exclusively occurred at the hard-soft interfaces between the Fe3O4 core and phenolic resin without the need of creating a limiting space, which represents a general and elegant approach to various core-shell nanostructures. The deformability of permeable phenolic layers plays an essential role in regulating the interfacial growth of Au nanoshells. While the polymer elasticity suppresses the radial deposition of Au atoms, their high deformability can afford enough spaces for the formation of conformal metallic shells. The coupled magnetic-plasmonic properties allow active tuning of the plasmon coupling and the resonant scattering of Au nanoshells by the magnetic assembly of the hybrid nanoparticles into plasmonic chains, whose potentials in applications have been demonstrated in designing transparent displays and anticounterfeiting devices.

We demonstrate a bio-inspired coating for novel imaging and sensing designs: the coating sorts different colors and linear polarizations. This coating, composed of conducting, nanofibrous polyaniline in an inverse opal film (PANI-IOF), is inexpensive and can feasibly be deposited over large areas on a range of flexible and non-flat substrates. With PANI IOFs, light is scattered into azimuthally polarized Debye rings. Subsequently, the diffracted speckle patterns carry compressed representations of the polarized illumination, which we reconstruct using shallow neural networks.

Plasmonic nanomaterials with strong absorption at near-infrared frequencies are promising photothermal therapy agents (PTAs). The pursuit of high photothermal conversion efficiency has been the central focus of this research field. Here, we report the development of plasmonic nanoparticle clusters (PNCs) as highly efficient PTAs and provide a semiquantitative approach for calculating their resonant frequency and absorption efficiency by combining the effective medium approximation (EMA) theory and full-wave electrodynamic simulations. Guided by the theoretical prediction, we further develop a universal strategy of space-confined seeded growth to prepare various PNCs. Under optimized growth conditions, we achieve a record photothermal conversion efficiency of up to ∼84% for gold-based PNCs, which is attributed to the collective plasmon-coupling-induced near-unity absorption efficiency. We further demonstrate the extraordinary photothermal therapy performance of the optimized PNCs iniin vivo/iapplication. Our work demonstrates the high feasibility and efficacy of PNCs as nanoscale PTAs.

We demonstrate polarization-switching in conducting, electrochromic photonic-crystal films. These ordered, multi-scale structures offer numerous opportunities for inexpensive, large-area, active metasurfaces and fabrication over flexible and non-flat substrates.

Mn4+ ion-doped red-emitting oxides are promising candidates for light-emitting-diode phosphors, but the formation and stabilization of Mn4+ in the oxide matrix remain a challenge due to the spontan...

Solar-driven interfacial steam generation is a promising technique for clean water production because it can minimize thermal loss by localizing solar-to-heat conversion at the air/liquid interface. Here we report an integrated solar evaporator by partially growing 2D polypyrrole microsheets within a melamine foam through chemical vapor polymerization. These microsheets can induce multiple light reflections within the foam, enable omnidirectional light absorption, provide abundant surfaces to promote heat transfer, and achieve spatially defined hydrophobicity to facilitate vapor escape. Meanwhile, the inherent hydrophilicity of the bottom part of the foam promotes spontaneous upward water transport and suppresses heat loss. The composite foam exhibits an excellent apparent evaporation rate of ∼2 kg/(m

Metal nanoparticles have drawn great attention in heterogeneous catalysis. One challenge is that they are easily deactivated by migration-coalescence during the catalysis process because of their high surface energy. With the rapid development of nanoscience, encapsulating metal nanoparticles in nanoshells or nanopores becomes one of the most promising strategies to overcome the stability issue of the metal nanoparticles. Besides, the activity and selectivity could be simultaneously enhanced by taking advantage of the synergy between the metal nanoparticles and the encapsulating materials as well as the molecular sieving property of the encapsulating materials. In this review, we provide a comprehensive summary of the recent progress in the synthesis and catalytic properties of the encapsulated metal nanoparticles. This review begins with an introduction to the synthetic strategies for encapsulating metal nanoparticles with different architectures developed to date, including their encapsulation in nanoshells of inorganic oxides and carbon, porous materials (zeolites, metal-organic frameworks, and covalent organic frameworks), and organic capsules (dendrimers and organic cages). The advantages of the encapsulated metal nanoparticles are then discussed, such as enhanced stability and recyclability, improved selectivity, strong metal-support interactions, and the capability of enabling tandem catalysis, followed by the introduction of some representative applications of the encapsulated metal nanoparticles in thermo-, photo-, and electrocatalysis. At the end of this review, we discuss the remaining challenges associated with the encapsulated metal nanoparticles and provide our perspectives on the future development of the field.

Thermal treatment is generally a desirable process to improve the properties of nanomaterials, which however often leads to undesirable problems such as aggregation and shape deformation. Here, we ...

We report a remarkable thickness-dependent wrinkling behavior of oxygen plasma-treated polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) films, in which an energy barrier separates the wrinkling mechanics into two regimes. For thick films, the film wrinkles with a constant periodicity which can be precisely predicted by the classic nonlinear finite mechanics. Reducing the film thickness below 1 mm leads to nonuniform wrinkles with an increasing periodicity which gives rise to random scattering and transparency changes under mechanical strains. By tuning the film thickness, we were able to control both the quality and size of the periodic wrinkles and further design mechanochromic devices featuring brilliant structural colors and programmable colorimetric responses. This work sheds light on the fundamental understanding of the wrinkling mechanics of bilayer systems and their intriguing mechanochromic applications.

The application of electrocatalysts with high activity to a practical water electrolysis cell is a crucial challenge for the production of pure hydrogen and commercialization of the water electrolyzer. Herein, a nanosized Cu0.5Co2.5O4 catalyst synthesized by co-precipitation by adjusting pH is applied to the anion exchange membrane water electrolysis (AEMWE) cell as an anode, which is demonstrated to have higher efficiency and stability than noble metal-based anodes. The composition (Cu/Co) and morphology of Cu0.5Co2.5O4 change as the pH increases and then nanoparticles are formed at pH 11, where oxygen vacancies are formed by the etching of Cu. In the density functional theory study, the electronic structure of Co modified by Cu in the Co3O4 lattice leads to an optimal adsorption strength, resulting in a free energy diagram in which the potential of Cu0.5Co2.5O4 (1.756 V vs. reversible hydrogen electrode, RHE) is more thermodynamically favorable than that of Co3O4 (1.951 V vs. RHE). The Cu0.5Co2.5O4 catalyst has a recorded overpotential of 285 mV at 10 mA cm−2 in 1 M KOH. Furthermore, the AEMWE cell using Cu0.5Co2.5O4 as an anode exhibited a current density of 1.3 A cm−2 at 1.8 V, which is the highest performance among the reported papers and maintains around 80% energy conversion efficiency for 100 hours.

Nanoscale oxide-based negative electrodes are of great interest for lithium ion batteries due to their high energy density, power density and enhanced safety. In this work, we conducted a case study on mesoporous TiO2 nanoparticle negative electrodes with uniform size and varying crystallinity in order to investigate the trend in the electrochemical properties of oxide-based nanoscale negative electrodes with varying crystallinity. Mesoporous solid spherical TiO2 nanoparticles with a uniform particle size and varying crystallinity, i.e., amorphous TiO2 (A-TiO2), partially crystalline TiO2 (PC-TiO2) and fully crystalline TiO2 (FC-TiO2) nanoparticles were studied. At low current rate (quasi steady-state), the specific capacity of the samples drops with the decrease of crystallinity. Ex situ synchrotron pair distribution function analysis reveals that the 1D zigzag Li ion diffusion pathway becomes expanded with the increase of crystallinity, which promotes ion mobility and charge storage. At high current rates (away from equilibrium states), however, the A-TiO2 sample demonstrates slightly larger capacity than the FC-TiO2 sample, both of which show larger capacities than that of the PC-TiO2 sample. Both A-TiO2 and FC-TiO2 samples exhibit higher capacitive contribution to the charge storage and larger Li+ diffusivity than those of the PC-TiO2 sample, which explains their better rate capability. Moreover, the larger Li+ diffusivity of the A-TiO2 sample leads to the slightly larger specific capacity than the FC-TiO2 sample at the highest current rate.

We report an oxide-assisted coating-etching process to remove bio-incompatible capping ligands from the surface of noble metal nanocrystals. The method involves the growth of a layer of cuprous oxide (Cu2O) on the nanocrystal surface to compete with the existing ligands, followed by selective etching of the Cu2O layer in the presence of a new ligand. Such a ligand exchange process has its significance in the biomedical applications of noble metal nanocrystals as many of them are not biocompatible due to the cytotoxicity of the original capping ligands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this strategy by focusing on cetyltrimethylammonium bromide-capped gold (CTAB-Au) nanorods, a class of very useful plasmonic nanomaterials with well-known bio-incompatibility due to the cytotoxicity of CTAB. After coating and etching of Cu2O on AuNRs, the CTAB ligands on the nanocrystal surface can be readily replaced by a poloxamer ligand F127, and the resulting AuNRs can be used in computed tomography and optical coherence tomography imaging with higher contrast enhancement than those capped with CTAB ligands. This strategy is scalable, general, and extendable to other types of nanocrystals, and it is expected to open up many new opportunities that have been not possible previously due to the bio-incompatibility of the nanomaterial.

Single-crystalline CoFe alloy nanoparticles encapsulated in nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes (CoFe@N–C) were synthesized through a simple heat-treatment in an N2 environment. CoFe@N–C effectively catalyzed the overall water splitting in alkaline media. Specifically, the as-synthesized CoFe@N–C exhibited excellent activity towards the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) with a low overpotential of 292 mV at 10 mA cm−2 and the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) with a low overpotential of 110 mV at 10 mA cm−2. The good electrocatalytic properties may be attributed to the synergistic electronic coupling between single-crystalline CoFe and highly conductive N-doped CNTs and the enrichment of active sites. Additionally, CoFe@N–C showed excellent stability and durability with no observable deviation in the overpotential for the OER and HER after 1000 cycles of cyclic voltammetry (CV).

Mechanical vibrations and solar energy are ubiquitous in the environment. Hereon, we report the synergic enhancement of the oxidation by simultaneously harvesting solar and mechanical vibrations through flexible piezo and photocatalytic composite nanofiber mats. Surface enriched titanium dioxide nanoparticles incorporated in polyacrylonitrile (PAN/TiO

Responsive chromic materials are highly desirable in the fields of displays, anti-counterfeiting, and camouflage, but their advanced applications are usually limited by the unrealized delicate and independent tunability of their three intrinsic attributes of color. This work achieves the separate, continuous, and reversible modulation of structural color brightness and hue with an aqueous suspension of dual-responsive Fe3O4@polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)@poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (PNIPAM) flexible photonic nanochains. The underlying modulation mechanism of color brightness was experimentally and numerically deciphered by analyzing the morphological responses to stimuli. When an increasing magnetic field was applied, the random worm-like flexible photonic nanochains gradually orientated along the field direction, due to the dominant magnetic dipole interaction over the thermal motion, lengthening the orientation segment length up to the whole of the nanochains. Consequently, the suspension displays increased color brightness (characterized by diffraction intensity). Meanwhile, the color hue (characterized by diffraction frequency) could be controlled by temperature, due to the volume changes of the interparticle PNIPAM. The achieved diverse color modulation advances the next-generation responsive chromic materials and enriches the basic understanding of the color tuning mechanisms. With versatile and facile color tunability and shape patterning, the developed responsive chromic liquid promises to have attractive potential in full-color displays and in adaptive camouflages.

Creating highly branched plasmonic superparticles can effectively induce broadband light absorption and convert light to heat regardless of the light wavelength, angle, and polarization. However, their direct synthesis in a controllable manner remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a strain modulation strategy to produce branched Au nanostructures that promotes the growth of Au on Au seeds in the Volmer-Weber (island) mode instead of the typical Frank-van der Merwe (layer-by-layer) mode. The key to this strategy is to continuously deposit polydopamine formed in situ on the growing surface of the seeds to increase the chemical potential of the subsequent deposition of Au, thus achieving continuous heterogeneous nucleation and growth. The branched Au superparticles exhibit a photothermal conversion efficiency of 91.0% thanks to their small scattering cross-section and direction-independent absorption. Even at a low light power of 0.5 W/cm2 and a low dosage of 25 ppm, these particles show an excellent efficacy in photothermal cancer therapy. This work provides the fundamental basis for designing branched plasmonic nanostructures and expands the application scope of the plasmonic photothermal effect.

Achieving high sensitivity over a broad pressure range remains a great challenge in designing piezoresistive pressure sensors due to the irreconcilable requirements in structural deformability against extremely high pressures and piezoresistive sensitivity to very low pressures. This work proposes a hybrid aerogel/hydrogel sensor by integrating a nanotube structured polypyrrole aerogel with a polyacrylamide (PAAm) hydrogel. The aerogel is composed of durable twined polypyrrole nanotubes fabricated through a sacrificial templating approach. Its electromechanical performance can be regulated by controlling the thickness of the tube shell. A thicker shell enhances the charge mobility between tube walls and thus expedites current responses, making it highly sensitive in detecting low pressure. Moreover, a nucleotide-doped PAAm hydrogel with a reversible noncovalent interaction network is harnessed as the flexible substrate to assemble the aerogel/hydrogel hybrid sensor and overcome sensing saturation under extreme pressures. This highly stretchable and self-healable hybrid polymer sensor exhibits linear response with high sensitivity (S

This paper presents a driver amplifier with high bandwidth-power efficiency, high capacitor-driving capacity, and low total harmonic distortion (THD). One complementary differential pair composed of self-cascode transistors is incorporated to obtain a full input voltage swing. Flipped voltage follower (FVF) buffers are applied as second stage to drive the last class-AB output stage. Moreover, a dual-loop active-feedback frequency compensation (DLAFC) is presented, which can stabilize the proposed multistage amplifier and keep the dominant pole on high frequency to obtain high-frequency total harmonic distortion (THD) suppression. To achieve a low-frequency phase margin protection (PMP), one left half-plane (LHP) zero is introduced to compensate for the nondominant pole caused by the load capacitor. Meanwhile, two high-frequency LHP zeros are injected to achieve high-frequency phase margin boosting (PMB) and reduce the amplifier’s settling time and integration area. This proposed amplifier is implemented in a standard DBH 0.18 μm 5 V CMOS process, and it achieves over 115-dB DC gain, 150–300 MHz GBW under 0–100 p load capacitors, ultra-high THD2,3 suppression ranges from 100 kHz to 10 MHz under 1–2 V output swing, and over 250 V/μs average slew rate, by only dissipating 12.5 mW at 5 V power supply.

Conventional colloidal syntheses typically produce nanostructures with positive curvatures due to thermodynamic preference. Here, we demonstrate the creation of surface concavity in Au nanorods through seed-mediated growth in confined spaces and report their thermochromic responses to temperature changes. The unique surface concavity is created by templating against Fe3O4 nanorods, producing a new concavity-sensitive plasmonic band. Due to the high surface energy, the metastable nanorods can be reconstructed at a moderate temperature, enabling convenient and precise tuning of their plasmonic properties by aging in different solvents. Such structural reconstruction of concave Au nanorods enables the fabrication of thermochromic plasmonic films that can display images with vivid color changes or exhibit encrypted, invisible information upon aging. This templating strategy is universal in creating concave nanostructures, which may open the door to designing new nanostructures with promising applications in sensing, anticounterfeiting, information encryption, and displays.

Morphological and magnetic anisotropy can be combined in colloidal assembly to create unconventional secondary structures. We show here that magnetite nanorods interact along a critical angle, depending on their aspect ratios and assemble into body-centered tetragonal colloidal crystals. Under a magnetic field, size-dependent attractive and repulsive domains develop on the ends and center of the nanorods, respectively. Our joint experiment-computational multiscale study demonstrates the presence of a critical angle in the attractive domain, which defines the equilibrium bonding states of interacting rods and leads to the formation of non–close-packed yet hard-contact tetragonal crystals. Small-angle x-ray scattering measurement attributes the perfect tetragonal phase to the slow assembly kinetics. The crystals exhibit brilliant structural colors, which can be actively tuned by changing the magnetic field direction. These highly ordered frameworks and well-defined three-dimensional nanochannels may offer new opportunities for manipulating nanoscale chemical transformation, mass transportation, and wave propagation.

A type-II analog phase-locked loop without charge pump and analog loop filter is proposed in this paper. A novel discrete proportional-integral-derivative circuit (DPIDC) is proposed to implement phase error integration and frequency compensation with time-domain processing. A phase-to-voltage converter (PVC) with a sample-and-hold is used to convert the phase error processed by the DPIDC to a voltage that controls the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). Simulation results in 180nm CMOS technology show the proposed DPIDC and PVC circuits only consume 6.5-µW power at 0.6-V supply voltage. The proposed PLL settles down steadily and achieves a normalized reference-spur rejection better than -84.6dBc.

Operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) are widely employed as active elements in filters, data converters, and buffer amplifiers. Inverter-based implementation of OTAs is an attractive approach for low voltage realization of analog subsystems. However, there are still fundamental challenges such as how to simultaneously achieve high DC gain, bandwidth, speed, and good noise performance based on existing inverter-based OTA architectures. In this paper, a new two stage OTA, hybrid with current reuse inverter OTA and Nauta transconductor is proposed to improving performance by taking advantages of their own merits. The introduced architecture is keeping the merits of Nauta transconductor such as high bandwidth, high speed and the superior input referred noise performance of the current reuse inverter-based OTA. Furthermore, in order to reduce the PVT variations, bulk tuning circuits based on "detecting-feedback" loop applied on CMFB and the output stage of Nauta transconductor is proposed to dynamically tune the output DC levels under PVT variations. The proposed new hybrid OTA is implemented in 180nm CMOS technology and achieves very competitive performance compares with all inverter based OTAs and the other state-of-the-art OTAs.

Nanocomposites containing FeS as catalyst and MoS

The fast and reversible switching of plasmonic color holds great promise for many applications, while its realization has been mainly limited to solution phases, achieving solid-state plasmonic color-switching has remained a significant challenge owing to the lack of strategies in dynamically controlling the nanoparticle separation and their plasmonic coupling. Herein, we report a novel strategy to fabricate plasmonic color-switchable silver nanoparticle (AgNP) films. Using poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) as the capping ligand and sodium borate as the salt, the borate hydrolyzes rapidly in response to moisture and produces OH- ions, which subsequently deprotonate the PAA on AgNPs, change the surface charge, and enable reversible tuning of the plasmonic coupling among adjacent AgNPs to exhibit plasmonic color-switching. Such plasmonic films can be printed as high-resolution invisible patterns, which can be readily revealed with high contrast by exposure to trace amounts of water vapor.

The molecule (E)-(5-(3-anthracen-9-yl-allylidene)-2,2-dimethyl-[1,3] dioxane-4,6-dione) (E-AYAD) undergoes E→Z photoisomerization. In the solid state, this photoisomerization process can initiate a physical transformation of the crystal that is accompanied by a large volume expansion (ca. 10 times), loss of crystallinity, and growth of large pores. This physical change requires approximately 10 % conversion of the E isomer to the Z isomer and results in a gel-like solid with decreased stiffness that still retains its mechanical integrity. The induced porosity allows the expanding gel to engulf superparamagnetic nanoparticles from the surrounding liquid. The trapped superparamagnetic nanoparticles impart a magnetic susceptibility to the gel, allowing it to be moved by a magnetic field. The photoinduced phase transition, starting with a compact crystalline solid instead of a dilute solution, provides a new route for in situ production of functional porous materials.