(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Putting 50 billion transistors into a microchip the size of a fingernail is a feat that requires manufacturing methods of nanometer-level precision. The process relies heavily on solvents that carry and deposit materials in each layer – solvents that can be difficult to handle and toxic to the environment. Now, researchers from Tufts University and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Milan, Italy, have developed a nanomanufacturing approach that uses water as the primary solvent, making it more environmentally compatible and opening the door to the development of devices that combine inorganic and biological materials.

(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense)
Researchers from the University of California San Diego have developed an innovative approach to multispectral photodetection by alternating layers of graphene and colloidal quantum dots. By carefully engineering the material stack, the researchers created photodetectors sensitive to different wavelength bands without additional optical components. The key innovation lies in using graphene monolayers as independent charge collectors at different depths within a quantum dot absorber layer.

(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from Penn State and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan have created a switch that turns on and off the presence of “kink states” – electrical conduction pathways at the edge of semiconducting materials. By controlling the formation of the kink states, researchers can regulate the flow of electrons in a quantum system. Kink states exist in a quantum device built with a bilayer graphene, which comprises two layers of atomically thin carbon stacked together, in such a way that the atoms in one layer are misaligned to the atoms in the other. “The amazing thing about our devices is that we can make electrons moving in opposite directions not collide with one another … even though they share the same pathways,” said Ke Huang, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense)
Caltech engineers have built a metasurface patterned with tunable nanoscale antennas capable of reflecting an incoming beam of optical light to create many channels of different optical frequencies. The work points to a promising route for the development of not only a new type of wireless communication channel but also potentially new range-finding technologies and even a novel way to relay larger amounts of data to and from space. “With these metasurfaces, we’ve been able to show that one beam of light comes in, and multiple beams of light go out, each with different optical frequencies and going in different directions,” says Harry Atwater, one of the engineers involved in this study. “It’s acting like an entire array of communication channels. And we’ve found a way to do this for free-space signals rather than signals carried on an optical fiber.”

(Funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration)
This online post from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration states that “[m]icroplastics and nanoplastics may be present in food, primarily from environmental contamination where foods are grown or raised,” but “[c]urrent scientific evidence does not demonstrate that levels of microplastics or nanoplastics detected in foods pose a risk to human health.”