Nanoscale & Nanoscale Advances Blog

Professor Kripa Varanasi and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a method of producing copper oxide nanowires on the surface of copper particles: a simple sintering process produces the structures. The amount of nanowire coverage observed is related to the size of the original copper particle.

The authors predict various applications of the structures including in thermal management – cooling boilers for example – or in catalysis.

The team are currently trying testing other metals to see if they react in the same way.

You can read more about this exciting work in their MIT press release.

Read the full Nanoscale paper today!

Size-dependent thermal oxidation of copper: single-step synthesis of hierarchical nanostructures
Christopher J. Love, J. David Smith, Yuehua Cui and Kripa K. Varanasi
DOI: 10.1039/C1NR10993F