Nanotechnology – Future Technology

Improving Low Electrical Current Measurements

Characterizing devices at low current levels requires knowledge, skill, and the right test equipment. Even with all three, achieving accuracy in these measurements can be a challenge because the current level is often at or below the noise level of the test setup. To ensure measurement accuracy, it is important to know the type of test equipment to use, the different sources of measurement error, and the appropriate techniques to minimize these errors. Examining several test examples, such as characterization of a field-effect transistor (FET) and a carbon nanotube, can help in the learning process. [...]

Carbon Nanotubes in Energy Storage Devices

Carbon Nanotubes with their extraordinary properties in terms of strength, thermal and electrical properties are poised to have a big impact on the future of material sciences, electronics and nanotechnology. Owing to their specialized structures and minute diameter, they can be utilized in the creation of ultra-thin energy storage devices which in today’s world where electronics is getting smaller could redefine the electronics market and replace capacitors and batteries they way we see them now. [...]

Using Carbon Nanotubes to Produce Electricity

The researchers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have uncovered a new phenomenon of carbon nanotubes. They found that carbon nanotubes discharge powerful waves of electricity under certain circumstances. MIT team named it as thermopower waves. They are pinning their hope on thermopower waves to produce electricity to be utilized in small electrical appliances or maybe in large-scale applications too. This project was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF). [...]

Unique Properties of Carbon Nanotubes can be Combined with Classical Physics

What limits the behaviour of a carbon nanotube? This is a question that many scientists are trying to answer. Physicists at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have now shown that electromechanical principles are valid also at the nanometre scale. In this way, the unique properties of carbon nanotubes can be combined with classical physics – and this may prove useful in the quantum computers of the future. [...]

The well-tempered Nanoribbons

As far back as the 1990s, long before anyone had actually isolated graphene – a honeycomb lattice of carbon just one atom thick – theorists were predicting extraordinary properties at the edges of graphene nanoribbons. Now physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and their colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and other institutions, have made the first precise measurements of the “edge states” of well-ordered nanoribbons. [...]