12-03 :: March/April 2012

nanotimes News in Brief

Christopher J. Russo and J. A. Golovchenko at School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University (US) demonstrate a scalable method for creating extremely small structures in graphene with atomic precision. It consists of indu- cing defect nucleation centers with energetic ions, followed by edge-selective electron recoil sputte- ring. As a first application, the researcher create gra- phene nanopores with radii as small as 3 Å, which corresponds to 10 atoms removed.

Christopher J. Russo and J. A. Golovchenko: Atom- by-atom nucleation and growth of graphene nanopo- res, In: PNAS Early View, April 6, 2012, DOI:10.1073/ pnas.1119827109:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1119827109

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Researcher at the Institute for Silicon Photovol- taics (E-I1) of Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB, Germany) in collaboration with the Institute for Solar Energy Research Hameln (ISFH) developed in a project funded by the German Federal Mini- stry for the Environment and the companies Bosch, Schott Solar, Sunways and Stiebel Eltron a novel type of solar cell called a “back-contact hetero- junction solar cell”. The new solar cell reached 20.2% efficiency. The cell developed by HZB and ISFH in their “TopShot” project has now been mea- sured by the calibration laboratory ISE CalLab, and has reached the highest independently confirmed efficiency of this type of solar cell.

Prof. Nils-Peter Harder. ISFH, Phone: +49 (0)5151-999- 631: http://www.isfh.de

The first Nano-Carbon Enhanced Materials Consor- tium (NCEM-1) will launch at Downing College, Cambridge on May 19, 2012. The mission of the consortium is to facilitate the commercial uptake of technologies based on nano-carbon materials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes. Members of the consortium include: University of Cambridge (UK); Nokia Research Centre (UK); ST Microelec- tronics (Switzerland); International Copper Asso- ciation (USA); Nexans (France); Bosch (Germany); Oxford Instruments (UK) and Codelco (Chile). The consortium is organized by the Centre for Busi- ness Innovation (CfBI) and will be facilitated by Dr. Bojan Boskovic, an international expert in nano- carbon technologies.

http://www.cfbi.com

A new nanostructured 3D current collector is demonstrated with a polyaniline (PANI)-based electrode system and is shown to deliver improved rate capability characteristics compared to planar configurations. We have been able to achieve stable capacities of 32 μAh/cm2

up to 75 cycles of charge/

discharge even at a current rate of 0.04 mA/cm2 and have observed good rate capability even at high current rates of 0.8 mA/cm2

.

Sanketh R. Gowda, Arava Leela Mohana Reddy, Xiaobo Zhan, Huma R. Jafry, and Pulickel M. Ajayan: 3D Nano- porous Nanowire Current Collectors for Thin Film Micro- batteries, In: Nano Letters, Vol. 12(2012), Issue 3, March 14, 2012, Pages 1198-1202, DOI:10.1021/nl2034464: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl2034464 http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~rv4/Ajayan/index.html