Author Archive

Editor’s Choice: Perovskite Nanomaterials and Devices – Professor Zhiqun Lin

Advisory Board member, Professor Zhiqun Lin, presents an online collection featuring some of our best recent articles on perovskite nanomaterials and devices, published in Nanoscale by world-leading researchers.

 

The past several years have been witness to an unprecedented advance in perovskite-based materials and devices. This new class of materials possess a set of superior optoelectronic properties, including tuneable direct band gaps, large absorption coefficient, high ambipolar mobility, long carrier diffusion lengths, small exciton binding energy, and high defect tolerance. In this context, it is pertinent to compile this themed issue centring on recent rapid development in the field of perovskite-based materials and devices for the solar energy conversion research community. To this end, we have collected an array of high-quality research articles and reviews recently published in Nanoscale. We hope that the readers find this themed collection informative and useful.

 

 

Read the collection here*

 

*All articles in this collection are free to access until the end of 2018.

 

Here’s a taste of what the collection has to offer:

Pramod S. Patil et al. 2018, 10, 4987-5034.
Zhiwen Jin and Shengzhong (Frank) Liu et al. 2017, 9, 6278-6285.
Yu Zhang and William W. Yu et al. 2018, 10, 4173-4178.
Jihoon Choi et al. 2018, 10, 1885-1891.

Nanoscale has established itself as a platform for high-quality, cross-community research that bridges the various disciplines involved with nanoscience and nanotechnology. Nanoscale‘s broad scope provides a rounded view of innovation in nano research, bridging the various disciplines involved with nanoscience and nanotechnology, and with an impact factor of 7.367*, we are proud to be the largest high impact journal in nanoscience.

Get in touch nanoscale-rsc@rsc.org or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

 

With regards,

Zhiqun Lin

Advisory Board, Nanoscale

Jeanne Andres

Managing Editor, Nanoscale

 

 

 

 

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Graphene 2018

The 8th edition of Graphene Conference series, the largest European Event in Graphene and 2D Materials, will be organized in Dresden (Germany) from the 26 – 29 of June 2018. Over the past 7 editions, the Graphene Conference has strengthened its position as the main meeting point of the Graphene community worldwide.

 

Topics include, but are not limited to :

  • Chemistry of 2D materials
  • Composites for Energy applications
  • Devices for Electronic Applications (flexible displays, high frequency devices, sensors, etc..)
  • Growth, synthesis techniques and integration methods
  • Health and Medical Applications
  • Photonics and Plasmonics
  • Quantum transport , magnetism and spintronics
  • Spectroscopies (Optics, Raman, EELS) and microscopies (HRTEM, STM, AFM)
  • Theory and Simulation

A fantastic line-up of speakers is confirmed, including plenary lectures from Professor Albert Fert and Professor Philip Kim. Visit the website for a full list of plenary, keynote, and invited speakers.

In this edition, the Graphene 2018 organisers (in collaboration with several institutions and companies) will offer awards to the best posters and oral presentations. Nanoscale and Journal of Materials Chemistry C are delighted to contribute RSC book vouchers to these awards. Only PhD students will be eligible to receive awards. Please visit the conference website for further details.

Abstract submission for posters finishes 18 May 2018 so don’t miss out on the chance to present your excellent graphene work!

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Meet our new Associate Editors

We are delighted to welcome five new Associate Editors for Nanoscale!

Quan Li

 

Quan Li is Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. She obtained her B.S. in Chemistry from Beijing University, China in 1997 and then her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University, USA, in 2001. Her research interests focus on functional materials and structures for energy and biomedical applications, as well as quantum sensing. In particular, developing energy storage materials such as electrode materials/architectures for Li- and Na- ion batteries. In investigating nano-bio interfaces, her group works on manipulating the interplay of nanoparticles of biological systems, and nanoparticles for vaccination applications. Her work of quantum sensing focus on sensor development and application in condense matter physics and biomedicine.

 

Paolo Samori

 

Paolo Samorì is Distinguished Professor at the Université de Strasbourg (UNISTRA), Director of the Institut de Science et d’Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS) and Director of the Nanochemistry Laboratory. He is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC), Member of the Academia Europaea and Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). He obtained a Laurea in Industrial Chemistry at University of Bologna in 1995. In 2000 he received his PhD in Chemistry from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has been awarded various prizes, including the Spanish-French “Catalán-Sabatier” Prize (2017) and the German-French “Georg Wittig – Victor Grignard” Prize (2017). He has published over 270 papers in the areas of nanoscience/nanotechnology and materials sciences with a specific focus on graphene and other 2D materials and self-assembled nanostructures, and more generally on (multi)functional nanomaterials for applications in opto-electronics, energy and sensing. He is also expert on hierarchical self-assembly of hybrid systems and on the use of scanning probe microscopies to unravel structures and dynamics of molecules at surfaces and interfaces.

 

Elena Shevchenko

 

Elena Shevchenko received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Belorussian State University in 1998 and PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2003. From 2003 to 2005, she was a joint postdoctoral fellow between Columbia University and the T. J. Watson Research Center. In 2005 she became a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2007, she has been a staff scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory. Her work has been recognized by Technology Review 35, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40. Research in Elena’s group focuses on the understanding of the mechanism of nucleation and growth of nanomaterials using in-situ techniques, exploring the structure-property correlation at the nanoscale, nanoparticle self-assembly and design of nanoscale functional materials for application in energy storage and energy conversion.

 

Lingdong Sun

 

Lingdong Sun is Professor at State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Materials Chemistry and Applications, Peking University, China. She obtained her PhD from Changchun Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 1996 before completing a post-doctoral research fellowship at Peking University in 1998. She has been a JSPS Senior Visiting Scholar at Keio University, Japan, since 2001. Her research is directed towards outstanding phenomena related with nanostructures including, excitonic transition and localized plasmonic properties of semiconductor nanocrystals; luminescent rare earth nanomaterials, bio-detection and imaging; materials chemistry in preparation and integration of individual nanostructures into functional assemblies.

 

Benjamin Wiley

 

Benjamin J. Wiley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Duke University. He received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003, and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2007. From 2007-2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Prof. Wiley is the recipient of the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, the CAREER award from the Nation Science Foundation, the Beilby Metal from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters, His current research focuses on sustainable, economical synthesis of nanostructures, understanding the processes that drive anisotropic growth of nanostructures, and understanding the structure-property relationship of nanostructures and nanostructured-composites for applications in optics, electronics, medicine, and electrochemistry.

 

 

 

All of our new Associate Editors are now handling papers for the journal, so we welcome you to submit to their Editor Centres if you feel that your manuscript fits with their area of expertise.

To read more exciting research articles visit our Nanoscale website and our blog. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

 

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Congratulations to our Highly Cited Nanoscale community!

We are delighted to have many world-leading researchers in our community, helping to guide Nanoscale Horizons and Nanoscale as high impact journals publishing first reports of exceptional significance and high quality research respectively across nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Many of our Board members and authors have been recognized in Clarivate Analytics’ recently published 2017 Highly Cited Researchers list!

Congratulations from the Nanoscale Horizons and Nanoscale teams to…

…Editorial Board members

…and Advisory Board members

  • Chad Mirkin, Northwestern University, USA
  • Rodney Ruoff, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
  • Hua Zhang, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Zhenan Bao, Stanford University, USA
  • Yunqi Liu, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Click on their names to check out some of their published work in Nanoscale.

If you think you might have some work that represents a brand new concept of exceptional significance then get in touch on nanoscalehorizons-rsc@rsc.org.

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Improved wound care glue from metal oxide nanoparticles

The need for tough, easily producible, tissue adhesives for medical applications is significant, and much recent research has focused on this expanding field. Surgical and wound care complications remain a major cause of post-operative mortality. Materials used for these applications need to withstand various mechanical deformations and movements while remaining strongly attached to the intended tissue.

A simple route to tissue adhesives has recently been described involving silica nanoparticles acting as physical adhesive layer between tissues. New research from the Hermann group at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology has expanded upon this concept with a new article published in Nanoscale. The researchers produce a library of inorganic oxide nanoparticles using a scalable and sterile flame spray pyrolysis method. The particles are then used study how different combinations of nanoparticles affect performance as tissue adhesives and also the toxicity of the resulting tissue adhesive materials.

An optimal composition of a mixture of bioglass and silica nanoparticles were found to have exceptionally strong procoagulant and adhesive properties whilst also maintaining superior cyto-compatibility. This highly modular synthetic method paves the way for use of metal oxide nanoparticles as bioactive adhesives in a range of exciting surgical and regenerative medicine applications.

 

Fig. 1. Inorganic nanoparticles and their use as tissue adhesives

Read the article:
Martin T. Matter, Fabian Starsich, Marco Galli, Markus Hilber, Andrea A. Schlegel, Sergio Bertazzo, Sotiris E. Pratsinis and Inge K. Herrmann
Nanoscale, 2017, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C7NR01176H

 

Alexander Cook is a guest web writer for the RSC journal blogs. He is a PhD researcher in the Perrier group at the University of Warwick, focusing on polymer materials and their use in various applications. Follow him on twitter @alexcook222

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Micromotors navigate tiny biochemical lab

Micromotors have been used for a wide range of applications, from hydrogen generation and bacteria capture, and now scientists from the University of Alcalá, Spain have utilised these useful micromachines in a lab-on-a-chip device. The little machines can navigate through the confined space to carry out fluorescence-based detection and even transport cargo in a complex medium that simulates blood plasma. There is no need for complex valves or pumps, just a simple magnetic field.

Described by nanobioelectronics and nanomotor experts as “a wonderful example” of carbon-based rockets for active transport showcasing a “potential breakthrough” as one of “very few practical applications”. Of particular importance is the incorporation of an anti-fouling layer that allows the micromotors to travel through complex mediums without degrading. This has the potential to overcome on of the key limiting factors in the advancement of biomedical applications in this field.

Read the full article in Chemistry World.

 

R. Maria-Hormigos, B. Jurado-Sánchez and A. Escarpa
Nanoscale, 2017,9, 6286-6290
DOI: 10.1039/C6NR09750B, Communicaton
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Conference promotion – ANM 2017

Nanoscale and Nanoscale Horizons are proud to support ANM 2017  a conference series on Advanced Nanomaterials, along Energy & Environmental Science, Molecular Systems Design & Engineering, and Sustainable Energy & Fuels. This conference series will take place at University of Aveiro, Portugal on 19 – 21 July 2017, and comprises the following symposia:

  • 9th International Conference on Advanced Nanomaterials
  • 3rd International Conference on Advanced Graphene Materials
  • 2nd International Conference on Advanced Magnetic and Spintronics Materials
  • 1st International Conference on Advanced Polymer Materials and Nanocomposites
  • A session dedicated to Hydrogen Energy

Poster abstract submission ends on 20 June and the registration deadline is 10 July! Visit the website for a full list of topics and speakers.

 

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Prize Winner: Professor Xiao Cheng Zeng

Congratulations to our Associate Editor, Professor Xiao Cheng Zen, who has been awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Surfaces and Interfaces Award for 2017 for his development of a unified theory to understand the relationship between structure and properties of nanoscale materials at surfaces and interfaces.

 

Xiao Cheng Zeng is currently at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where his main research interests cover the physical chemistry of confined water, ice, and ice hydrate in nanoscale; ions and radicals at air/water interfaces; heterogeneous catalysis on supported gold clusters; and computer-aided design of low-dimensional materials including liganded gold clusters and perovskite solar-cell materials.

He is the recipient of many awards, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). He has published 475+ articles in refereed journals (Google Scholar h-index: 70; citations 17000+). Four articles were featured in Chemistry World (RSC) and ten papers were featured in Chemical & Engineering News (ACS).

 

 

Professor Xiao Cheng Zen has been an Associate Editor for Nanoscale since 2012, and we congratulate him for his success!

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New crosslinked conjugated polymers in quantum dot LEDs

A new photo-induced polymer crosslinking strategy has been used to produce optoelectronic devices with improved performance by a group of Chinese researchers. This has allowed quantum dot LED devices to be fabricated on flexible plastic substrates as the scientists can avoid high temperature thermal annealing.

Developed at Soochow University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, the researchers believe this crosslinking strategy provides an excellent general method for improving film quality in solution-processed multi-layer LEDs and optoelectronic devices.

The improved efficiency of the devices has been ascribed to superior film surface morphology of the device layers, as the range of non-orthogonal solvents able to be used for solution processing is greatly broadened due to layer crosslinking. The device is based on a hole transport layer of conjugated polymer poly[(9,9-dioctylfluorenyl-2,7-diyl)-alt-(4,4’-(N-(4-butylphenyl)))] (TFB), which is crosslinked with a bifunctional benzophenone, with the crosslinked hole transport layer device giving a 2 times higher efficiency than the device without layer crosslinking.

Fig. 1. New photochemical crosslinking method enables fabrication of novel all-solution-processed multilayer optoelectronic devices to improve device performance using both orthogonal and non-orthogonal solvents.

 

Read the article:

Crosslinked conjugated polymers as hole transport layers in high-performance quantum dot light-emitting diodes

Yatao Zou, Ying Liu, Muyang Ban, Qi Huang, Teng Sun, Qing Zhang,* Tao Song* and Baoquan Sun*

Nanoscale Horizons, 2017, DOI: 10.1039/C6NH00217J

 

Alexander Cook is a guest web writer for the RSC journal blogs. He is a PhD researcher in the Perrier group at the University of Warwick, focusing on polymer materials and their use in various applications. Follow him on twitter @alexcook222

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