11-02/03 :: February / March 2011

nanotimes News in Brief

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team created an electronic sensor that can detect the slightest touch. “It detects pressures well below the pressure exerted by a 20-milligram bluebottle fly carcass we experimented with, and does so with unprecedented speed,” said Zhenan Bao, an asso- ciate professor of chemical engineering who led the research.

The key innovation in the new sensor is the use of a thin film of rubber molded into a grid of tiny pyramids, Bao said.

“We found that with a very thin continuous film, when you press on it, the material does not have room to expand,” said Stefan Mannsfeld, a former postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering and a coauthor. “So the molecules in the conti- nuous rubber film are forced closer together and become entangled. When pressure is released, they cannot go back to the original arrangement, so the sensor doesn‘t work as well.”

Stefan C. B. Mannsfeld, Benjamin C-K. Tee, Randall M. Stoltenberg, Christopher V. H-H. Chen, Soumendra Bar- man, Beinn V. O. Muir, Anatoliy N. Sokolov, Colin Ree- se, Zhenan Bao: Highly sensitive flexible pressure sensors with microstructured rubber dielectric layers, In: Nature Materials, Vol. 9(2010), September 12, 2010, Pages 859- 864, DOI:10.1038/nmat2834: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat2834

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYFVtH3hiC0 http://baogroup.stanford.edu

http://npl-web.stanford.edu/research/