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nanotimes News in Brief

their VarioS microscanner construction kit, the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, who rank among the leading developers of microscanners, have now come up with a way to significantly reduce the wai- ting time for industrial customers.

Their innovation is a modular production system to which customers can enter an inquiry via an Internet platform. Similar to an online shop, custo- mers can select the microscanner that suits them or configure the microscanner within certain design constraints. They can choose from among different mirror diameters or models with mirrors one- or two-dimensional pivoting mirrors. Depending on how elaborate a customer’s needs are, delivery times for a new microscanner now range between three and no more than nine weeks.

11-01 :: December 2010 / January 2011

The German Federal Government Action Plan Nanotechnology 2015 has been approved. It con- tains six fields of activities. In 2010, the German Federal Government has funded nanotechnology within the framework of projects and institutional funding with $525 million. That is an increase of more than 50% compared to federal spending in 2006.

http://www.bmbf.de

Kyoto University professor Hiroshi Kitagawa and his team used nanotechnology to combine rhodium and silver, elements which do not usually mix, to produce a new composite. The alloy has simi- lar properties to palladium. They have used the chemical reduction method to obtain such Ag-Rh alloys, and XRD and STEM-EDX give clear evidence that the alloys mixed at the atomic level. From the measurements of hydrogen pressure-composition isotherms and solid-state 2H NMR, They have revealed that Ag-Rh solid-solution alloys absorb hy- drogen, and the total amount of hydrogen absorbed reached a maximum at the ratio of Ag:Rh = 50:50, where the electronic structure is expected to be similar to that of Pd.

http://kuchem.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ossc/index.html http://www.icems.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/

Wafer with various MEMS scanners. © IPMS http://www.micro-mirrors.com

Kohei Kusada, Miho Yamauchi, Hirokazu Kobayashi, Hi- roshi Kitagawa, and Yoshiki Kubota: Hydrogen-Storage Properties of Solid-Solution Alloys of Immiscible Neighbo- ring Elements with Pd, In: Journal of the American Chemi- cal Society, Volume 132(2010), Issue 45, November 17, 2010, Pages 15896-15898, DOI:10.1021/ja107362z: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja107362z