Category Archives: nanophotonics

Teeny adventures, Latent Life, and photonic writing—a March 28, 2023 talk at 1 pm PT at the University of British Columbia

After reading the latest newsletter (received via email on March 20, 2023), featuring Scott Billings’ talk ‘Latest Life’, from the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Belkin Gallery I was reminded of a book produced at the nanoscale back in 2009 (May 21, 2009 posting; scroll down to the final paragraph) and which I wrote about again in 2012 (October 12, 2012 posting) when ‘Teeny Ted from Turnip Town’ was added to the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s smallest book. (‘Teeny Ted’ also has a Wikipedia entry.)

The March 20, 2023 Belkin Gallery (also known as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery) newsletter is promoting the next Ars Scientia events (the information can also be found on this webpage),

We hope you’ll join us this spring for talks and presentations related
to our ongoing research projects in art and science, and the
Anthropocene. Over the past years, we have developed a deep and
abiding interdisciplinary research practice related to these themes,
working with diverse disciplines that are fortified through oppositions,
collaborations and the celebration of new perspectives. We have shared
our different fields of experience, expertise and resources to catalyze
meaningful responses to research, pedagogy, communication and outreach,
and in doing so build responses that are more than the sum of their
parts. This methodology of bringing the unique perspectives and
practices of artists and curators to academic units presents an
opportunity to foster new modes of knowledge exchange. In this spirit,
we hope you’ll join us in thinking through these critical areas of
inquiry.

Ars Scientia

Building on exhibitions like The Beautiful Brain and Drift, the Ars Scientia research project connects artists with physicists to explore the intersections between the disciplines of art and science. A collaboration between the Belkin, the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Blusson Quantum Matter Institute [QMI], [emphases mine] this spring’s artists’ residencies culminate in a series of talks by JG Mair, Scott Billings and Timothy Taylor, followed by a symposium in May with keynote speaker Kavita Philip.

Tuesday, March 28 [2023] at 1 pm [PT]

Artist Talk with Scott Billings

Tuesday, April 4 [2023] at 2 pm [PT]

Artist Talk with Timothy Taylor

Monday, May 15 [2023]

Symposium with keynote by Kavita Philip

I have more details (logistics in particular) about the Scott Billings talk, from the QMI Ars Scientia Artist Talks 2023: Latent Life by Scott Billings events page,

Please join Scott Billings for Latent Life, a presentation based on his recent research in the Ars Scientia residency. Drawing from a 1933 lecture in which Neils Bohr asserts that the impossibility of using a physical explanation for the phenomenon of life is analogous to the insufficiency of using a mechanical analysis to understand phenomena of the atom, Billings will discuss his seemingly conflicting dual practice as both visual artist and mechanical engineer. Reflecting upon a preoccupation with the animality of cinematic machine, among (many) other things, Billings will relay his recent direct experience with photonic writing [emphasis mine] at QMI’s NanoFab Lab and the wonderful new conundrum of making and exhibiting micro-sculptures that are far too small to see with the naked eye.

Date & time: March 28 [2023], 1:00-2:00pm [PT]

Location: 311, Brimacombe Building (2355 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4)

For more information on this event, please click here.

Photonic writing and sculpture? I’m guessing the word ‘writing’ in this context doesn’t mean what it usually means. Still, it did bring back memories of the world’s smallest book. I always did wonder about the point of producing book that couldn’t be read without expensive equipment. And now, there’s sculpture that can’t be seen.

I hope Billings’s talk will shed some light on this phenomenon of artists and writers creating objects than cannot be seen with the naked eye. Scientists do this sort of thing for fun but the motivation for writers and artists seems to be about proving something and not at all about play.

Neuromorphic computing and liquid-light interaction

Simulation result of light affecting liquid geometry, which in turn affects reflection and transmission properties of the optical mode, thus constituting a two-way light–liquid interaction mechanism. The degree of deformation serves as an optical memory allowing to store the power magnitude of the previous optical pulse and use fluid dynamics to affect the subsequent optical pulse at the same actuation region, thus constituting an architecture where memory is part of the computation process. Credit: Gao et al., doi 10.1117/1.AP.4.4.046005

This is a fascinating approach to neuromorphic (brainlike) computing and given my recent post (August 29, 2022) about human cells being incorporated into computer chips, it’s part o my recent spate of posts about neuromorphic computing. From a July 25, 2022 news item on phys.org,

Sunlight sparkling on water evokes the rich phenomena of liquid-light interaction, spanning spatial and temporal scales. While the dynamics of liquids have fascinated researchers for decades, the rise of neuromorphic computing has sparked significant efforts to develop new, unconventional computational schemes based on recurrent neural networks, crucial to supporting wide range of modern technological applications, such as pattern recognition and autonomous driving. As biological neurons also rely on a liquid environment, a convergence may be attained by bringing nanoscale nonlinear fluid dynamics to neuromorphic computing.

A July 25, 2022 SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics) press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item,

Researchers from University of California San Diego recently proposed a novel paradigm where liquids, which usually do not strongly interact with light on a micro- or nanoscale, support significant nonlinear response to optical fields. As reported in Advanced Photonics, the researchers predict a substantial light–liquid interaction effect through a proposed nanoscale gold patch operating as an optical heater and generating thickness changes in a liquid film covering the waveguide.

The liquid film functions as an optical memory. Here’s how it works: Light in the waveguide affects the geometry of the liquid surface, while changes in the shape of the liquid surface affect the properties of the optical mode in the waveguide, thus constituting a mutual coupling between the optical mode and the liquid film. Importantly, as the liquid geometry changes, the properties of the optical mode undergo a nonlinear response; after the optical pulse stops, the magnitude of liquid film’s deformation indicates the power of the previous optical pulse.

Remarkably, unlike traditional computational approaches, the nonlinear response and the memory reside at the same spatial region, thus suggesting realization of a compact (beyond von-Neumann) architecture where memory and computational unit occupy the same space. The researchers demonstrate that the combination of memory and nonlinearity allow the possibility of “reservoir computing” capable of performing digital and analog tasks, such as nonlinear logic gates and handwritten image recognition.

Their model also exploits another significant liquid feature: nonlocality. This enables them to predict computation enhancement that is simply not possible in solid state material platforms with limited nonlocal spatial scale. Despite nonlocality, the model does not quite achieve the levels of modern solid-state optics-based reservoir computing systems, yet the work nonetheless presents a clear roadmap for future experimental works aiming to validate the predicted effects and explore intricate coupling mechanisms of various physical processes in a liquid environment for computation.

Using multiphysics simulations to investigate coupling between light, fluid dynamics, heat transport, and surface tension effects, the researchers predict a family of novel nonlinear and nonlocal optical effects. They go a step further by indicating how these can be used to realize versatile, nonconventional computational platforms. Taking advantage of a mature silicon photonics platform, they suggest improvements to state-of-the-art liquid-assisted computation platforms by around five orders magnitude in space and at least two orders of magnitude in speed.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Thin liquid film as an optical nonlinear-nonlocal medium and memory element in integrated optofluidic reservoir computer by Chengkuan Gao, Prabhav Gaur, Shimon Rubin, Yeshaiahu Fainman. Advanced Photonics, 4(4), 046005 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.AP.4.4.046005 Published: 1 July 2022

This paper is open access.

Physics of a singing saw could lead to applications in sensing, nanoelectronics, photonics, etc.

I’d forgotten how haunting a musical saw can sound,

An April 22, 2022 news item on Nanowerk announces research into the possibilities of a singing saw,

The eerie, ethereal sound of the singing saw has been a part of folk music traditions around the globe, from China to Appalachia, since the proliferation of cheap, flexible steel in the early 19th century. Made from bending a metal hand saw and bowing it like a cello, the instrument reached its heyday on the vaudeville stages of the early 20th century and has seen a resurgence thanks, in part, to social media.

As it turns out, the unique mathematical physics of the singing saw may hold the key to designing high quality resonators for a range of applications.

In a new paper, a team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Physics used the singing saw to demonstrate how the geometry of a curved sheet, like curved metal, could be tuned to create high-quality, long-lasting oscillations for applications in sensing, nanoelectronics, photonics and more.

An April 21, 2022 Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) news release by Leah Burrows (also on EurekAlert but published on April 22, 2022) delves further into physics of singing saws,

“Our research offers a robust principle to design high-quality resonators independent of scale and material, from macroscopic musical instruments to nanoscale devices, simply through a combination of geometry and topology,” said L Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics and senior author of the study.

While all musical instruments are acoustic resonators of a kind, none work quite like the singing saw.

“How the singing saw sings is based on a surprising effect,” said Petur Bryde, a graduate student at SEAS and co-first author of the paper. “When you strike a flat elastic sheet, such as a sheet of metal, the entire structure vibrates. The energy is quickly lost through the boundary where it is held, resulting in a dull sound that dissipates quickly. The same result is observed if you curve it into a J-shape. But, if you bend the sheet into an S-shape, you can make it vibrate in a very small area, which produces a clear, long-lasting tone.”

The geometry of the curved saw creates what musicians call the sweet spot and what physicists call localized vibrational modes — a confined area on the sheet which resonates without losing energy at the edges.

Importantly, the specific geometry of the S-curve doesn’t matter. It could be an S with a big curve at the top and a small curve at the bottom or visa versa. 

“Musicians and researchers have known about this robust effect of geometry for some time, but the underlying mechanisms have remained a mystery,” said Suraj Shankar, a Harvard Junior Fellow in Physics and SEAS and co-first author of the study.  “We found a mathematical argument that explains how and why this robust effect exists with any shape within this class, so that the details of the shape are unimportant, and the only fact that matters is that there is a reversal of curvature along the saw.”

Shankar, Bryde and Mahadevan found that explanation via an analogy to very different class of physical systems — topological insulators. Most often associated with quantum physics, topological insulators are materials that conduct electricity in their surface or edge but not in the middle and no matter how you cut these materials, they will always conduct on their edges.

“In this work, we drew a mathematical analogy between the acoustics of bent sheets and these quantum and electronic systems,” said Shankar.

By using the mathematics of topological systems, the researchers found that the localized vibrational modes in the sweet spot of singing saw were governed by a topological parameter that can be computed and which relies on nothing more than the existence of two opposite curves in the material. The sweet spot then behaves like an internal “edge” in the saw.

“By using experiments, theoretical and numerical analysis, we showed that the S-curvature in a thin shell can localize topologically-protected modes at the ‘sweet spot’ or inflection line, similar to exotic edge states in topological insulators,” said Bryde. “This phenomenon is material independent, meaning it will appear in steel, glass or even graphene.”

The researchers also found that they could tune the localization of the mode by changing the shape of the S-curve, which is important in applications such as sensing, where you need a resonator that is tuned to very specific frequencies.

Next, the researchers aim to explore localized modes in doubly curved structures, such as bells and other shapes.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Geometric control of topological dynamics in a singing saw by Suraj Shankar, Petur Bryde, and L. Mahadevan. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) April 21, 2022 | 119 (17) e2117241119 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117241119

This paper is open (free) access.

Quantum memristors

This March 24, 2022 news item on Nanowerk announcing work on a quantum memristor seems to have had a rough translation from German to English,

In recent years, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous, with applications such as speech interpretation, image recognition, medical diagnosis, and many more. At the same time, quantum technology has been proven capable of computational power well beyond the reach of even the world’s largest supercomputer.

Physicists at the University of Vienna have now demonstrated a new device, called quantum memristor, which may allow to combine these two worlds, thus unlocking unprecedented capabilities. The experiment, carried out in collaboration with the National Research Council (CNR) and the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, has been realized on an integrated quantum processor operating on single photons.

Caption: Abstract representation of a neural network which is made of photons and has memory capability potentially related to artificial intelligence. Credit: © Equinox Graphics, University of Vienna

A March 24, 2022 University of Vienna (Universität Wien) press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains why this work has an impact on artificial intelligence,

At the heart of all artificial intelligence applications are mathematical models called neural networks. These models are inspired by the biological structure of the human brain, made of interconnected nodes. Just like our brain learns by constantly rearranging the connections between neurons, neural networks can be mathematically trained by tuning their internal structure until they become capable of human-level tasks: recognizing our face, interpreting medical images for diagnosis, even driving our cars. Having integrated devices capable of performing the computations involved in neural networks quickly and efficiently has thus become a major research focus, both academic and industrial.

One of the major game changers in the field was the discovery of the memristor, made in 2008. This device changes its resistance depending on a memory of the past current, hence the name memory-resistor, or memristor. Immediately after its discovery, scientists realized that (among many other applications) the peculiar behavior of memristors was surprisingly similar to that of neural synapses. The memristor has thus become a fundamental building block of neuromorphic architectures.

A group of experimental physicists from the University of Vienna, the National Research Council (CNR) and the Politecnico di Milano led by Prof. Philip Walther and Dr. Roberto Osellame, have now demonstrated that it is possible to engineer a device that has the same behavior as a memristor, while acting on quantum states and being able to encode and transmit quantum information. In other words, a quantum memristor. Realizing such device is challenging because the dynamics of a memristor tends to contradict the typical quantum behavior. 

By using single photons, i.e. single quantum particles of lights, and exploiting their unique ability to propagate simultaneously in a superposition of two or more paths, the physicists have overcome the challenge. In their experiment, single photons propagate along waveguides laser-written on a glass substrate and are guided on a superposition of several paths. One of these paths is used to measure the flux of photons going through the device and this quantity, through a complex electronic feedback scheme, modulates the transmission on the other output, thus achieving the desired memristive behavior. Besides demonstrating the quantum memristor, the researchers have provided simulations showing that optical networks with quantum memristor can be used to learn on both classical and quantum tasks, hinting at the fact that the quantum memristor may be the missing link between artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

“Unlocking the full potential of quantum resources within artificial intelligence is one of the greatest challenges of the current research in quantum physics and computer science”, says Michele Spagnolo, who is first author of the publication in the journal “Nature Photonics”. The group of Philip Walther of the University of Vienna has also recently demonstrated that robots can learn faster when using quantum resources and borrowing schemes from quantum computation. This new achievement represents one more step towards a future where quantum artificial intelligence become reality.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Experimental photonic quantum memristor by Michele Spagnolo, Joshua Morris, Simone Piacentini, Michael Antesberger, Francesco Massa, Andrea Crespi, Francesco Ceccarelli, Roberto Osellame & Philip Walther. Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 318–323 (2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-00973-5 Published 24 March 2022 Issue Date April 2022

This paper is open access.

Sticky tape, hackers, and quantum communications

I always appreciate a low technology solution to a problem. In this case, it’s a piece of sticky tape which halts compute hackers in their tracks. Here’s more from an August 30, 2021 University of Technology Sydney press release (also on EurekAlert but published August 26, 2021), Note: Links have been removed,

Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and TMOS, an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence [specifically, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS)], have taken the fight to online hackers with a giant leap towards realizing affordable, accessible quantum communications, a technology that would effectively prevent the decryption of online activity. Everything from private social media messaging to banking could become more secure due to new technology created with a humble piece of adhesive tape.

Quantum communication is still in its early development and is currently feasible only in very limited fields due to the costs associated with fabricating the required devices. The TMOS researches have developed new technology that integrates quantum sources and waveguides on chip in a manner that is both affordable and scalable, paving the way for future everyday use.

The development of fully functional quantum communication technologies has previously been hampered by the lack of reliable quantum light sources that can encode and transmit the information.

In a paper published today in ACS Photonics, the team describes a new platform to generate these quantum emitters based on hexagonal boron nitride, also known as white graphene. Where current quantum emitters are created using complex methods in expensive clean rooms, these new quantum emitters can be created using $20 worth of white graphene pressed on to a piece of adhesive tape.

These 2D materials can be pressed onto a sticky surface such as the [sic] adhesive tape [emphasis mine] and exfoliated, which is essentially peeling off the top layer to create a flex. Multiple layers of this flex can then be assembled in a Lego-like style, offering a new bottom up approach as a substitute for 3D systems.

TMOS Chief Investigator Igor Aharonovich said: “2D materials, like hexagonal boron nitride, are emerging materials for integrated quantum photonics, and are poised to impact the way we design and engineer future optical components for secured communication.”

In addition to this evolution in photon sources, the team has developed a high efficiency on-chip waveguide, a vital component for on-chip optical processing.

Lead author Chi Li said: “Low signal levels have been a significant barrier preventing quantum communications from evolving into practical, workable models. We hope that with this new development, quantum comms will become an everyday technology that improves people’s lives in new and exciting ways.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Integration of hBN Quantum Emitters in Monolithically Fabricated Waveguides by Chi Li, Johannes E. Fröch, Milad Nonahal, Thinh N. Tran, Milos Toth, Sejeong Kim, and Igor Aharonovich. ACS Photonics 2021, XXXX, XXX, XXX-XXX DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.1c00890 Publication Date:August 20, 2021 © 2021 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Sticky or adhesive tape is part of graphene lore and seems to exert a great fascination for scientists as I note in my June 12, 2018 posting.

Metals useful in photonics?

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have debunked a myth, one involving metals and light according to a March 1i, 2021 news item on phys.org (Note: Links have been removed),

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have debunked the decade-old myth of metals being useless in photonics—the science and technology of light—with their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, expected to lead to many applications in the field of nanophotonics.

“We broke the record for the resonance quality factor (Q-factor) of a periodic array of metal nanoparticles by one order of magnitude compared to previous reports,” said senior author Dr. Ksenia Dolgaleva, Canada Research Chair in Integrated Photonics (Tier 2) and Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa.

A March 18, 2021 University of Ottawa news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, introduced me to the word ‘lossy’ and discussed the decade-long myth in more detail,

“It is a well-known fact that metals are very lossy when they interact with light, which means they cause the dissipation of electrical energy. The high losses compromise their use in optics and photonics. We demonstrated ultra-high-Q resonances in a metasurface (an artificially structured surface) comprised of an array of metal nanoparticles embedded inside a flat glass substrate. These resonances can be used for efficient light manipulating and enhanced light-matter interaction, showing metals are useful in photonics.”

“In previous works, researchers attempted to mitigate the adverse effect of losses to access favorable properties of metal nanoparticle arrays,” observed the co-lead author of the study Md Saad Bin-Alam, a uOttawa doctoral student in EECS.

“However, their attempts did not provide a significant improvement in the quality factors of the resonances of the arrays. We implemented a combination of techniques rather than a single approach and obtained an order-of-magnitude improvement demonstrating a metal nanoparticle array (metasurface) with a record-high quality factor.”

According to the researchers, structured surfaces – also called metasurfaces – have very promising prospects in a variety of nanophotonic applications that can never be explored using traditional natural bulk materials. Sensors, nanolasers, light beam shaping and steering are just a few examples of the many applications.

“Metasurfaces made of noble metal nanoparticles – gold or silver for instance – possess some unique benefits over non-metallic nanoparticles. They can confine and control light in a nanoscale volume that is less than one quarter of the wavelength of light (less than 100 nm, while the width of a hair is over 10 000 nm),” explained Md Saad Bin-Alam.

“Interestingly, unlike in non-metallic nanoparticles, the light is not confined or trapped inside the metal nanoparticles but is concentrated close to their surface. This phenomenon is scientifically called ‘localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs)’. This feature gives a great superiority to metal nanoparticles compared to their dielectric counterparts, because one could exploit such surface resonances to detect bio-organisms or molecules in medicine or chemistry. Also, such surface resonances could be used as the feedback mechanism necessary for laser gain. In such a way, one can realize a nanoscale tiny laser that can be adopted in many future nanophotonic applications, like light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for the far-field object detection.”

According to the researchers, the efficiency of these applications depends on the resonant Q-factors.

“Unfortunately, due to the high ‘absorptive’ and ‘radiative’ loss in metal nanoparticles, the LSPRs Q-factors are very low,” said co-lead author Dr. Orad Reshef, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa.

“More than a decade ago, researchers found a way to mitigate the dissipative loss by carefully arranging the nanoparticles in a lattice. From such ‘surface lattice’ manipulation, a new ‘surface lattice resonance (SLR)’ emerges with suppressed losses. Until our work, the maximum Q-factors reported in SLRs was around a few hundred. Although such early reported SLRs were better than the low-Q LSPRs, they were still not very impressive for efficient applications. It led to the myth that metals are not useful for practical applications.”

A myth that the group was able to deconstruct during its work at the University of Ottawa’s Advanced Research Complex between 2017 and 2020.

“At first, we performed numerical modelling of a gold nanoparticle metasurface and were surprised to obtain quality factors of several thousand,” said Md Saad Bin-Alam, who primarily designed the metasurface structure.

“This value has never been reported experimentally, and we decided to analyze why and to attempt an experimental demonstration of such a high Q. We observed a very high-Q SLR of value nearly 2400, that is at least 10 times larger than the largest SLRs Q reported earlier.”

A discovery that made them realize that there’s still a lot to learn about metals.

“Our research proved that we are still far from knowing all the hidden mysteries of metal (plasmonic) nanostructures,” concluded Dr. Orad Reshef, who fabricated the metasurface sample. “Our work has debunked a decade-long myth that such structures are not suitable for real-life optical applications due to the high losses. We demonstrated that, by properly engineering the nanostructure and carefully conducting an experiment, one can improve the result significantly.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ultra-high-Q resonances in plasmonic metasurfaces by M. Saad Bin-Alam, Orad Reshef, Yaryna Mamchur, M. Zahirul Alam, Graham Carlow, Jeremy Upham, Brian T. Sullivan, Jean-Michel Ménard, Mikko J. Huttunen, Robert W. Boyd & Ksenia Dolgaleva. Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 974 (2021) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21196-2 Published 12 February 2021

This paper is open access.

Stretching diamonds to improve electronic devices

On the last day of 2020, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) announced a technique for stretching diamonds that could result in a new generation of electronic devices. A December 31, 2020 news item on ScienceDaily makes the announcement,

Diamond is the hardest material in nature. It also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A research team has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their findings have shown the potential of strained diamonds as prime candidates for advanced functional devices in microelectronics, photonics, and quantum information technologies.

A December 31, 2020 CityU press release on EurekAlert , which originated the news item, delves further into the research,

The research was co-led by Dr Lu Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE) at CityU and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Their findings have been recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Science, titled “Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond“.

“This is the first time showing the extremely large, uniform elasticity of diamond by tensile experiments. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of developing electronic devices through ‘deep elastic strain engineering’ of microfabricated diamond structures,” said Dr Lu.

Diamond: “Mount Everest” of electronic materials

Well known for its hardness, industrial applications of diamonds are usually cutting, drilling, or grinding. But diamond is also considered as a high-performance electronic and photonic material due to its ultra-high thermal conductivity, exceptional electric charge carrier mobility, high breakdown strength and ultra-wide bandgap. Bandgap is a key property in semi-conductor, and wide bandgap allows operation of high-power or high-frequency devices. “That’s why diamond can be considered as ‘Mount Everest’ of electronic materials, possessing all these excellent properties,” Dr Lu said.

However, the large bandgap and tight crystal structure of diamond make it difficult to “dope”, a common way to modulate the semi-conductors’ electronic properties during production, hence hampering the diamond’s industrial application in electronic and optoelectronic devices. A potential alternative is by “strain engineering”, that is to apply very large lattice strain, to change the electronic band structure and associated functional properties. But it was considered as “impossible” for diamond due to its extremely high hardness.

Then in 2018, Dr Lu and his collaborators discovered that, surprisingly, nanoscale diamond can be elastically bent with unexpected large local strain. This discovery suggests the change of physical properties in diamond through elastic strain engineering can be possible. Based on this, the latest study showed how this phenomenon can be utilized for developing functional diamond devices.

Uniform tensile straining across the sample

The team firstly microfabricated single-crystalline diamond samples from a solid diamond single crystals. The samples were in bridge-like shape – about one micrometre long and 300 nanometres wide, with both ends wider for gripping (See image: Tensile straining of diamond bridges). The diamond bridges were then uniaxially stretched in a well-controlled manner within an electron microscope. Under cycles of continuous and controllable loading-unloading of quantitative tensile tests, the diamond bridges demonstrated a highly uniform, large elastic deformation of about 7.5% strain across the whole gauge section of the specimen, rather than deforming at a localized area in bending. And they recovered their original shape after unloading.

By further optimizing the sample geometry using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard, they achieved a maximum uniform tensile strain of up to 9.7%, which even surpassed the maximum local value in the 2018 study, and was close to the theoretical elastic limit of diamond. More importantly, to demonstrate the strained diamond device concept, the team also realized elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays.

Tuning the bandgap by elastic strains

The team then performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations to estimate the impact of elastic straining from 0 to 12% on the diamond’s electronic properties. The simulation results indicated that the bandgap of diamond generally decreased as the tensile strain increased, with the largest bandgap reduction rate down from about 5 eV to 3 eV at around 9% strain along a specific crystalline orientation. The team performed an electron energy-loss spectroscopy analysis on a pre-strained diamond sample and verified this bandgap decreasing trend.

Their calculation results also showed that, interestingly, the bandgap could change from indirect to direct with the tensile strains larger than 9% along another crystalline orientation. Direct bandgap in semi-conductor means an electron can directly emit a photon, allowing many optoelectronic applications with higher efficiency.

These findings are an early step in achieving deep elastic strain engineering of microfabricated diamonds. By nanomechanical approach, the team demonstrated that the diamond’s band structure can be changed, and more importantly, these changes can be continuous and reversible, allowing different applications, from micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), strain-engineered transistors, to novel optoelectronic and quantum technologies. “I believe a new era for diamond is ahead of us,” said Dr Lu.

Here’s an illustration provided by the researchers,

Caption: Stretching of microfabricated diamonds pave ways for applications in next-generation microelectronics.. Credit: Dang Chaoqun / City University of Hong Kong

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond by Chaoqun Dang, Jyh-Pin Chou, Bing Dai, Chang-Ti Chou, Yang Yang, Rong Fan, Weitong Lin, Fanling Meng, Alice Hu, Jiaqi Zhu, Jiecai Han, Andrew M. Minor, Ju Li, Yang Lu. Science 01 Jan 2021: Vol. 371, Issue 6524, pp. 76-78 DOI: 10.1126/science.abc4174

This paper is behind a paywall.

Viburnum and a new kind of structural colo(u)r

I love structural colo(u) and the first such story here was this February 7, 2013 posting, which is where you’ll find the image below,

AGELESS BRILLIANCE: Although the pigment-derived leaf color of this decades-old specimen of the African perennial Pollia condensata has faded, the fruit still maintains its intense metallic-blue iridescence.COURTESY OF P.J. RUDALL [downloaded from http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34200/title/Color-from-Structure/]

Those berries are stunning especially when you realize they are part of a long-dead Pollia plant. Scientist, Rox Middleton of University of Bristol (UK) was studying the structures that render the Pollia plant’s berries (fruit) blue when she decided to study another, more conveniently accessible plant with blue fruit. That’s when she got a surprise (from an August 11, 2020 article by Véronique Greenwood for the New York Times),

Big, leafy viburnum bushes have lined yards in the United States and Europe for decades — their domes of blossoms have an understated attractiveness. But once the flowers of the Viburnum tinus plant fade, the shrub makes something unusual: shiny, brilliantly blue fruit.

Scientists had noticed that pigments related to those in blueberries exist in viburnum fruit, and assumed that this must be the source of their odd hue. Blue fruit, after all, is rare. But researchers reported last week in Current Biology that viburnum’s blue is actually created by layers of molecules arranged under the surface of the skin, a form of what scientists call structural color. By means still unknown, the plant’s cells create thin slabs of fat [emphasis mine] arranged in a stack, like the flakes of puff pastry, and their peculiar gleam is the result.

Rox Middleton, a researcher at University of Bristol in England and an author of the new paper, had been studying the African pollia plant, which produces its own exotic blue fruit. But viburnum fruit were everywhere, and she realized that their blue had not been well-studied. Along with Miranda Sinnott-Armstrong, a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and other colleagues, she set out to take a closer look at the fruit’s skin.

The pollia fruit’s blue is a form of structural color, in which light bounces off a regularly spaced arrangement of tiny structures such that certain wavelengths, usually those that look blue or green to us, are reflected back at the viewer. In pollia fruit, the color comes from light interacting with thin sheets of cellulose packed together. At first the team thought there would be something similar in viburnum. But they saw no cellulose stacks.

The research team has concluded that all it comes down the arrangement of fat molecules, which are also responsible for the cloudier, metallic blue in viburnum berries,

Caption Closeup of viburnum tinus. Credit: Rox Middleton Courtesy University of Cambridge

I encourage you to read Greenwood’s August 11, 2020 article in its entirety. For those who like more details, there are two press releases. The first is an August 6, 2020 University of Cambridge press release on EurekAlert. Middleton completed the ‘Virbunum’ research while completing her PhD at Cambridge. As mentioned earlier, Middleton is currently a researcher at the University of Bristol and they issued an August 11, 2020 press release touting her accomplishment.

Finally, for the insatiably curious, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Viburnum tinus Fruits Use Lipids to Produce Metallic Blue Structural Color by Rox Middleton, Miranda Sinnott-Armstrong, Yu Ogawa, Gianni Jacucci, Edwige Moyroud, Paula J. Rudall, Chrissie Prychid, Maria Conejero, Beverley J. Glover, Michael J. Donoghue, Silvia Vignolini. Current Biology DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.005 Published:August 06, 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

Shining a light on flurocarbon bonds and robotic ‘soft’ matter research

Both of these news bits are concerned with light for one reason or another.

Rice University (Texas, US) and breaking fluorocarbon bonds

The secret to breaking fluorocarbon bonds is light according to a June 22, 2020 news item on Nanowerk,

Rice University engineers have created a light-powered catalyst that can break the strong chemical bonds in fluorocarbons, a group of synthetic materials that includes persistent environmental pollutants.

A June 22, 2020 Rice University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the work in greater detail,

In a study published this month in Nature Catalysis, Rice nanophotonics pioneer Naomi Halas and collaborators at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Princeton University showed that tiny spheres of aluminum dotted with specks of palladium could break carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds via a catalytic process known as hydrodefluorination in which a fluorine atom is replaced by an atom of hydrogen.

The strength and stability of C-F bonds are behind some of the 20th century’s most recognizable chemical brands, including Teflon, Freon and Scotchgard. But the strength of those bonds can be problematic when fluorocarbons get into the air, soil and water. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, for example, were banned by international treaty in the 1980s after they were found to be destroying Earth’s protective ozone layer, and other fluorocarbons were on the list of “forever chemicals” targeted by a 2001 treaty.

“The hardest part about remediating any of the fluorine-containing compounds is breaking the C-F bond; it requires a lot of energy,” said Halas, an engineer and chemist whose Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) specializes in creating and studying nanoparticles that interact with light.

Over the past five years, Halas and colleagues have pioneered methods for making “antenna-reactor” catalysts that spur or speed up chemical reactions. While catalysts are widely used in industry, they are typically used in energy-intensive processes that require high temperature, high pressure or both. For example, a mesh of catalytic material is inserted into a high-pressure vessel at a chemical plant, and natural gas or another fossil fuel is burned to heat the gas or liquid that’s flowed through the mesh. LANP’s antenna-reactors dramatically improve energy efficiency by capturing light energy and inserting it directly at the point of the catalytic reaction.

In the Nature Catalysis study, the energy-capturing antenna is an aluminum particle smaller than a living cell, and the reactors are islands of palladium scattered across the aluminum surface. The energy-saving feature of antenna-reactor catalysts is perhaps best illustrated by another of Halas’ previous successes: solar steam. In 2012, her team showed its energy-harvesting particles could instantly vaporize water molecules near their surface, meaning Halas and colleagues could make steam without boiling water. To drive home the point, they showed they could make steam from ice-cold water.

The antenna-reactor catalyst design allows Halas’ team to mix and match metals that are best suited for capturing light and catalyzing reactions in a particular context. The work is part of the green chemistry movement toward cleaner, more efficient chemical processes, and LANP has previously demonstrated catalysts for producing ethylene and syngas and for splitting ammonia to produce hydrogen fuel.

Study lead author Hossein Robatjazi, a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSB who earned his Ph.D. from Rice in 2019, conducted the bulk of the research during his graduate studies in Halas’ lab. He said the project also shows the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.

“I finished the experiments last year, but our experimental results had some interesting features, changes to the reaction kinetics under illumination, that raised an important but interesting question: What role does light play to promote the C-F breaking chemistry?” he said.

The answers came after Robatjazi arrived for his postdoctoral experience at UCSB. He was tasked with developing a microkinetics model, and a combination of insights from the model and from theoretical calculations performed by collaborators at Princeton helped explain the puzzling results.

“With this model, we used the perspective from surface science in traditional catalysis to uniquely link the experimental results to changes to the reaction pathway and reactivity under the light,” he said.

The demonstration experiments on fluoromethane could be just the beginning for the C-F breaking catalyst.

“This general reaction may be useful for remediating many other types of fluorinated molecules,” Halas said.

Caption: An artist’s illustration of the light-activated antenna-reactor catalyst Rice University engineers designed to break carbon-fluorine bonds in fluorocarbons. The aluminum portion of the particle (white and pink) captures energy from light (green), activating islands of palladium catalysts (red). In the inset, fluoromethane molecules (top) comprised of one carbon atom (black), three hydrogen atoms (grey) and one fluorine atom (light blue) react with deuterium (yellow) molecules near the palladium surface (black), cleaving the carbon-fluorine bond to produce deuterium fluoride (right) and monodeuterated methane (bottom). Credit: H. Robatjazi/Rice University

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Plasmon-driven carbon–fluorine (C(sp3)–F) bond activation with mechanistic insights into hot-carrier-mediated pathways by Hossein Robatjazi, Junwei Lucas Bao, Ming Zhang, Linan Zhou, Phillip Christopher, Emily A. Carter, Peter Nordlander & Naomi J. Halas. Nature Catalysis (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-020-0466-5 Published: 08 June 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

Northwestern University (Illinois, US) brings soft robots to ‘life’

This June 22, 2020 news item on ScienceDaily reveals how scientists are getting soft robots to mimic living creatures,

Northwestern University researchers have developed a family of soft materials that imitates living creatures.

When hit with light, the film-thin materials come alive — bending, rotating and even crawling on surfaces.

A June 22, 2020 Northwestern University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Amanda Morris, which originated the news item, delves further into the details,

Called “robotic soft matter by the Northwestern team,” the materials move without complex hardware, hydraulics or electricity. The researchers believe the lifelike materials could carry out many tasks, with potential applications in energy, environmental remediation and advanced medicine.

“We live in an era in which increasingly smarter devices are constantly being developed to help us manage our everyday lives,” said Northwestern’s Samuel I. Stupp, who led the experimental studies. “The next frontier is in the development of new science that will bring inert materials to life for our benefit — by designing them to acquire capabilities of living creatures.”

The research will be published on June 22 [2020] in the journal Nature Materials.

Stupp is the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern and director of the Simpson Querrey Institute He has appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Feinberg School of Medicine. George Schatz, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Weinberg, led computer simulations of the materials’ lifelike behaviors. Postdoctoral fellow Chuang Li and graduate student Aysenur Iscen, from the Stupp and Schatz laboratories, respectively, are co-first authors of the paper.

Although the moving material seems miraculous, sophisticated science is at play. Its structure comprises nanoscale peptide assemblies that drain water molecules out of the material. An expert in materials chemistry, Stupp linked the peptide arrays to polymer networks designed to be chemically responsive to blue light.

When light hits the material, the network chemically shifts from hydrophilic (attracts water) to hydrophobic (resists water). As the material expels the water through its peptide “pipes,” it contracts — and comes to life. When the light is turned off, water re-enters the material, which expands as it reverts to a hydrophilic structure.

This is reminiscent of the reversible contraction of muscles, which inspired Stupp and his team to design the new materials.

“From biological systems, we learned that the magic of muscles is based on the connection between assemblies of small proteins and giant protein polymers that expand and contract,” Stupp said. “Muscles do this using a chemical fuel rather than light to generate mechanical energy.”

For Northwestern’s bio-inspired material, localized light can trigger directional motion. In other words, bending can occur in different directions, depending on where the light is located. And changing the direction of the light also can force the object to turn as it crawls on a surface.

Stupp and his team believe there are endless possible applications for this new family of materials. With the ability to be designed in different shapes, the materials could play a role in a variety of tasks, ranging from environmental clean-up to brain surgery.

“These materials could augment the function of soft robots needed to pick up fragile objects and then release them in a precise location,” he said. “In medicine, for example, soft materials with ‘living’ characteristics could bend or change shape to retrieve blood clots in the brain after a stroke. They also could swim to clean water supplies and sea water or even undertake healing tasks to repair defects in batteries, membranes and chemical reactors.”

Fascinating, eh? No batteries, no power source, just light to power movement. For the curious, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Supramolecular–covalent hybrid polymers for light-activated mechanical actuation by Chuang Li, Aysenur Iscen, Hiroaki Sai, Kohei Sato, Nicholas A. Sather, Stacey M. Chin, Zaida Álvarez, Liam C. Palmer, George C. Schatz & Samuel I. Stupp. Nature Materials (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0707-7 Published: 22 June 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.