News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers at North Carolina State University have studied the behavior of birnessite – a hydrated layered form of manganese oxide – to understand what happens when ions penetrate very small spaces. The adsorption of ions from the electrolyte at an electrode surface is a ubiquitous process of use for both existing and emerging electrochemical energy technologies. The researchers found that nanoconfined water in between the layers of birnessite is effectively serving as a buffer that makes capacitive behavior possible without causing significant structural change in the birnessite.

A team of researchers from University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and international institutions wrote an article that gives an overview of almost three decades of research into colloidal quantum dots, assesses the technological progress for these nanometer-sized specs of semiconductor matter, and weighs the remaining challenges on the path to widespread commercialization for this promising technology, with applications in everything from TVs to highly efficient sunlight collectors.

Researchers at Penn State have discovered new types of defects in two-dimensional (2D) materials, which may give insight into how to create materials without such imperfections. 2D materials are essential for developing new ultra-compact electronic devices, but producing defect-free 2D materials is a challenge.

Electrical engineers at Vanderbilt University have developed an on-demand, scalable technique to manipulate nanodiamonds. These researchers are the first to introduce an approach for trapping and moving a nanomaterial, known as a single colloidal nanodiamond with nitrogen-vacancy centers using a low-power laser beam.

Researchers from Northwestern University have found that boosting the function of natural killer cells with magnetic nanoparticles could make cancer immunotherapy more efficient. This method could unlock the potential to use natural killer cells on a variety of solid tumors.

Researchers from UCLA and Cedars-Sinai have developed a new way to detect a potentially life-threatening condition that can occur during pregnancy called placenta accreta spectrum disorder. The new approach uses a technology called the NanoVelcro Chip. The chip is a postage stamp–sized device with nanowires that are 1,000 times thinner than a human hair and coated with antibodies which can recognize specific placenta cells in the mother’s blood that are linked to placenta accreta spectrum disorder. 

A team of researchers from MIT, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, and international institutions has devised a highly efficient method for removing uranium from drinking water. Applying an electric charge to graphene oxide foam, the researchers can capture uranium in solution, which precipitates out as a condensed solid crystal. The foam may be reused up to seven times without losing its electrochemical properties.

Hydrogen fuel derived from the sea could be an abundant and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels, but the potential power source has been limited by technical challenges, including how to practically harvest it. Now, researchers at the University of Central Florida have designed, for the first time, a nanoscale material that can efficiently split seawater into oxygen and hydrogen.

A team of German and U.S. researchers has detected the rolling movement of a nano-acoustic wave predicted by the famous physicist and Nobel prize-winner Lord Rayleigh in 1885. The researchers used a nanowire inside which electrons are forced onto circular paths by the spin of the acoustic wave. This phenomenon can find applications in acoustic quantum technologies or in so-called phononic components, which are used to control the propagation of acoustic waves. 

Researchers have revealed the correlated structural and chemical evolution of silicon and the solid-electrolyte interplay that forms in all batteries and makes them work. The researchers grew a “forest” of silicon nanowires on a stainless steel disk as the anode for a battery and found that the electrolyte penetrates silicon everywhere, forming pockets of solid-electrolyte interplay that disrupt electron pathways. This process disconnects isolated islands of silicon in the anode that cannot contribute to battery capacity.