A team of researchers has recently developed nanomaterials as potential contributors to electronics that are so tiny in size.
According to a Nanowerk report, scientists have specifically developed materials for next-gen electronics, so small that they are not just indistinguishable when they are closely packed but do not reflect enough light to display fine details like colors, even with the use of powerful optical microscopes.
With the use of an optical microscope, carbon nanotubes, for instance, look grayish. The lack of ability to determine fine details and differences between individual pieces of nanomaterials makes it hard for researchers to examine their unique properties and find ways to perfect them for industrial function.
In a new paper, UC Riverside researchers described a revolutionary imaging technology compressing lamp light into a spot with a nanometer size.
A Magic Wand-Like Tool
The said technology holds that light at the end of a silver nanowire similar to a Hogwarts student who practices the "Lumos" spell and uses it to uncover hidden details, including colors.
This advance, enhancing color-imaging resolution to an exceptional six-nanometer level, will help researchers see nanomaterials in adequate detail to make them more functional in electronics, as well as other applications.
Associate professors Ruoxue Yan and Ming Liu, in Riverside's Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, developed this one-of-a-kind mechanism with a "superfocusing technique" that the team developed.
This approach has been utilized in previous work published in Nature Photonics to observe the molecular bonds' vibration at "1-nanometer spatial resolution" minus the need for any focusing lens.
The New Technique
In this new report published in Nature Communications, Liu and Yan adjusted the tool to gauge signals that span the entire visible wavelength range, which can be utilized to render the color and illustrate the object's band structures, rather than only molecule vibrations.
Essentially, this tool squeezes the light from a tungsten lamp into a silver nanowire with almost-zero reflection or scattering. The free electrons' oscillation wave brings light to the silver surface.
The condensed light leaves the silver nanowire tip, which contains a radius of only five nanometers, in a conical path, as in the light beam coming from a flashlight. When this particular tip passes over an object, its impact on the beam shape and color is detected and recorded.
Liu said it is like using the thumb to control the water spray from a hose when describing the technique. One knows how to get the desired pattern for spraying by changing the thumb's position. Similarly, in the study, the researchers read the light pattern to gather the object's detail, blocking the five-nanometer-sized light nozzle.
The light is then concentrated into a spectrometer, where it forms a small ring shape. By the probe over a site and recording a pair of spectra for each pixel, the study authors can develop the absorption and the scattering images with colors.
Related information about carbon nanotube is shown on Right Vision's YouTube video below:
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