Forward
- PDF / 50,770 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 270 Views
Forward Guest Editors: Reshef Tenne Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel
Pulickel M. Ajayan Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180
Zhong Lin Wang Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
Yadong Li Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Peidong Yang University of California−Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720
Recent years have witnessed a surge of research and development efforts in the field of 1-dimensional (1D) nanostructures like carbon nanotubes, inorganic nanotubes, and nanowires. Generally speaking the field is not new, since work on whisker growth of various sorts has flourished already a few decades ago. This effort culminated in the large scale synthesis of, e.g., boron carbide or SiC whiskers1 on the one hand, and elucidating the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth mechanism by Wagner and Ellis2 on the other. As is the case also for 0dimensional (0D) nanoparticles like metallic gold nanoparticles, which have been used for centuries as the red pigment in paintings, the early work was limited in its objectives and scope for a number of reasons. In the early days the most desirable application for whiskers was as a strengthening component in a variety of matrices used for structural materials. Currently the major thrust in developing new 1D nanostructures-based technologies goes to molecular electronics, photonics, field emission, and sensor and biomedical applications, in addition to ultrastrong nanocomposites. More recently, research into the harnessing of solar energy into electricity and the chemical storage of energy using 1D nanostructures has been thriving. A variety of other applications are also in the process of being developed. Nanocharacterization and manipulation tools that were in their infancy a few decades ago became a research mainstream with ever higher spatial and energy resolution and more exquisite in situ control on the manipulation of such nanostructures. Spherical aberration corrected high resolution transmission electron microscopes (HRTEM) with resolution approaching 0.7 Å, which can,
DOI: 10.1557/JMR.2006.0367 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 21, No. 11, Nov 2006
for example, resolve oxygen vacancies for the first time, are now commercially available. Electron energy loss spectrometers that are mounted on HRTEM with spatial and energy resolution approaching 1 Å and 0.1 eV, respectively, are able to resolve the chemical nature of (heavy) individual atoms in a solid matrix and the nature of the chemical bonding in the tiniest nanostructures. Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) with
Data Loading...
