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Researchers from North Carolina State University have created flower-like structures out of germanium sulfide (GeS) – a semiconductor material – that have extremely thin petals with an enormous surface area. The GeS flower holds promise for next-generation energy storage devices and solar cells.
Image: The GeS „nanoflowers“ have petals only 20-30nm thick, and provide a large surface area in a small amount of space. © NCSU
Chun Li, Liang Huang, Gayatri Pongur Snigdha and Linyou Cao: Role of Boundary Layer Diffusion in Vapor Deposition Growth of Chalcogenide Nanosheets: The Case of GeS, In: ACS Nano ASAP, September 25, 2012, DOI: 10.1021/nn303745e:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn303745e http://www.ncsu.edu/
A team of physicists at Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching), Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), and California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, USA) develops a scheme for noise tolerant and yet safely encrypted quantum tokens. Unforgeable quantum credit cards in sight.
Fernando Pastawskia, Norman Y. Yaob, Liang Jiangc, Mik- hail D. Lukinb, and J. Ignacio Ciraca: Unforgeable noise-tolerant quantum tokens, In: PNAS,Vol. 109, No. 40, October 2, 2012, Pages 16079-16082, DOI:10.1073/ pnas.1203552109:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1203552109
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Delaware (US) is developing a novel structural health monitoring system that could avert construction disasters in the future. Erik Thostenson and Thomas Schumacher, both affiliated faculty members in the UD Center for Composite Materi- als, have received a three-year $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the use of carbon nanotube composites as a kind of “smart skin” for structures. In preliminary research, the two found that a carbon nanotube hybrid glassfiber composite attached to small-scale concrete beams formed a continuous conductive skin that is exceptionally sensitive to changes in strain as well as to the development and growth of damage.