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QUT researchers accidentally discover atomic-scale wires Watch Now
Researchers from Australia, China, and Japan are one step closer to shrinking electronic devices to molecular scale after accidentally developing a wire that is just one atom wide.
The study, which was carried out by researchers from the Queensland University of Technology s (QUT) Centre for Materials Science, Shanghai s Fudan University, and Japan s National Institute for Materials Science, was initially examining the properties of silver on an atomic scale.
They did this by putting nanoparticles of silver on the outside of tiny nanorods that have channels inside.
According to QUT professor Dmitri Golberg, these experiments are usually performed in a vacuum, but they decided to test it in regular air.
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Super solution in hybrid capacitor development
In a step towards a new type of energy storage, QUT researchers have developed a hybrid supercapacitor that offers the best of both worlds in energy storage.
When it comes to the electronic devices we commonly use, energy storage is typically done in either batteries of supercapacitors, with both having their own strengths and limitations.
Batteries store large amounts of energy but are slower to discharge energy. Supercapacitors can only store about one-tenth of the energy of a battery but are quicker at discharging it. They are used as secondary power supply in devices such as smartphones, cameras and laptops, and have a far longer cycle life.
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IMAGE: From left, Dr Anja Goldmann, Dr Hendrik Frisch, Daniel Kodura, and Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik. view more
Credit: QUT
Scientists frequently look at how molecules behave in nature to help them design chemical processes, and that s what Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Ghent University researchers did to create a green light-stabilised 3D polymer structure that unfolds itself when left in darkness.
The team has reported on this world-first example of a reversible, light-triggered process to fold polymers into single chain nanoparticles in the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry,
Chemical Science.
The research was conducted by lead author and QUT PhD student Daniel Kodura, with QUT s Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA Fellow Dr Hendrik Frisch, Dr Anja Goldmann, PhD student Fabian Bloesser and ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik, from the Soft Matter Materials Laboratory in QUT s Centre fo