The latest issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry is now online. You can read the full issue here.
The outside front cover features an article on Dielectric behavior of self-assembled monolayers by Oktay Yildirim, Peter J. de Veen, Michiel G. Maas, Minh D. Nguyen, David N. Reinhoudt, Dave H. A. Blank, Guus Rijnders and Jurriaan Huskens.
Three-dimensional tubular arrays of MnO2–NiO nanoflakes with high areal pseudocapacitance is the article highlighted on the inside front cover by Jinping Liu, Jian Jiang, Michel Bosman and Hong Jin Fan.
Issue 6 contains the following Feature articles:
- Recent progress on growth and device development of ZnO and CuO nanostructures and graphene nanosheets
- Hybrid solar cells: basic principles and the role of ligands
- Materials nanoarchitectonics for environmental remediation and sensing
Why not take a look at the articles today and blog your thoughts and comments below.
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Scientists at Tongji University, Shanghai, China, have developed a method of creating patterns on photonic paper that are only visible when the paper is wet. The siloxane-containing photonic paper is fabricated by using lithography to create a contrast of crosslinking or degree of hydrophobization. When the invisible prints are soaked in water for several minutes, the small difference in reflection wavelength (λ) between the pattern and the background is significantly amplified due to their different swelling speeds, which leads to a visible image. The process is fully reversible and soaking and drying will repeat the cycle of showing and hiding the patterns.
Combining metallic nanoparticles with host materials whose dielectric properties can be tuned by means of an external control is one route to create “active plasmonics”. In this hot article a soft-matter periodic structure made from a composite mixture of cholesteric liquid crystals and Au nanoparticles is reported. The cholesteric liquid crystals act as a “host fluid” whose refractive index can be varied in a broad range by using external electric fields and temperature variations. This has a strong influence on the position of the plasmonic absorption peak of the nanoparticles.