(Press-News.org) In the materials science equivalent of a football fan jumping onto the field and scoring a touchdown, scientists are documenting that one fundamental component of computer chips, long regarded as a passive bystander, can actually be made to act like a switch. That potentially allows it to take part in the electronic processes that power cell phones, iPads, computers, and thousands of other products. In a report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the scientists document the multiple ways in which silicon dioxide, long regarded simply as an electric insulator, gets involved in the action. This behavior had formerly confused scientists working in the area of nanoelectronics — they thought that the switching was due to the nano-additive but it turns out that the source of the switching might be from the underlying silicon oxide itself.
Jun Yao, Douglas Natelson, Lin Zhong, and James Tour explain that manufacturers have long used silicon oxide, normally a very poor conductor of electricity, as both a supportive and insulating material in electronics. Silicon, a primary component of beach sand, is the semiconductor material at the heart of modern electronics. When bound to oxygen, the resulting silicon oxide is generally one of the highest quality electronic insulating materials. The scientists recently showed, however, that the oxide material can be converted to a switchable conductor by an electrical process. This phenomenon may hold the key to developing a new generation of smaller, more powerful computer chips, but the mechanism behind this switching was unclear, until now. It also clarifies the possible nature behind the switching events in former molecular and nano-scale systems.
The scientists sandwiched a nano-sized layer of silicon oxide, thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair, between two electrodes and exposed the device to increasing amounts of electrical current. They demonstrated that electricity can cause the silicon oxide to breakdown into smaller components, nano-sized crystals of silicon, in a way that boosts its electrical conductivity and makes it a player in the working processes of computer chips.
INFORMATION:
The authors acknowledged funding from the Army Research Office, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, the Texas Instruments Leadership University Fund, and National Science Foundation Award No. 0720825.
ARTICLE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Silicon Oxide: A Non-innocent Surface for Molecular Electronics and Nanoelectronics Studies"
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE
http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ja108277r
CONTACT:
James M. Tour, Ph.D.
T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry
Professor of Computer Science
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
Rice University
Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, MS222
6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
Phone: 713-348-6246, Fax: 713-348-6250
Email: tour@rice.edu, Web: http://www.jmtour.com
END
Scientists are reporting development and successful lab tests of "killer paper," a material intended for use as a new food packaging material that helps preserve foods by fighting the bacteria that cause spoilage. The paper, described in ACS' journal, Langmuir, contains a coating of silver nanoparticles, which are powerful anti-bacterial agents.
Aharon Gedanken and colleagues note that silver already finds wide use as a bacteria fighter in certain medicinal ointments, kitchen and bathroom surfaces, and even odor-resistant socks. Recently, scientists have been exploring ...
Scientists are reporting an advance in overcoming a major barrier to the use of the genetic material RNA in nanotechnology — the field that involves building machines thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair and now is dominated by its cousin, DNA. Their findings, which could speed the use of RNA nanotechnology for treating disease, appear in the monthly journal ACS Nano.
Peixuan Guo and colleagues point out that DNA, the double-stranded genetic blueprint of life, and RNA, its single-stranded cousin, share common chemical features that can serve as building ...
Knee replacement patients undergoing telerehabilitation – a unique Internet-based postoperative rehabilitation program that can be conducted from the patient's home – experience the same results as patients who undergo traditional postoperative rehabilitation, according to a new study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). Telerehabilitation is becoming a popular alternative for patients who live in remote areas and who have no access to traditional rehabilitation centers.
"The concept for telerehabilitation is a decade old; however, well-conducted ...
Scientists are reporting a key advance toward development of a way to combat the terrible plant diseases that caused the Irish potato famine and still inflict billions of dollars of damage to crops each year around the world. Their study appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Organic Letters.
Teck-Peng Loh and colleagues point out that the Phytophthora fungi cause extensive damage to food crops such as potatoes and soybeans as well as to ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons. One species of the fungus caused the Irish potato famine in the mid 1840s. That disaster ...
An Inserm research team in Toulouse, led by Dr Stein Silva (Inserm Unit 825 "Brain imaging and neurological handicaps"), working with the "Modelling tissue and nociceptive stress" Host Team (MATN IFR 150), were interested in studying the illusions described by many patients under regional anaesthetic. In their work, to be published in the journal Anesthesiology, the researchers demonstrated that anaesthetising an arm affects brain activity and rapidly impairs body perception.
The ultimate aim of the work is to understand how neuronal circuits are reorganised at this ...
The blood test procedure used on newborn infants for 40 years is finding a second life in the search for new lifesaving medications, according to an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.
C&EN Senior Editor Celia Henry Arnaud notes that collecting drops of blood from patients and depositing the drops on special paper cards to dry has been used for decades to screen newborns for hereditary disorders and infectious disease. But the dried blood spot technology has found a new role at pharmaceutical companies in the ...
The current Special Issue of Technology & Innovation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors ™, (www.academyofinventors.org), now available on-line at: http://www.cognizantcommunication.com/filecabinet/Technology/techinnovation.html , is focused on the history, process and practice of scientific peer review, with several articles aimed at assessing scientific peer review within the federal government and peer review's relationship to federal policy formation.
According to A. Alan Moghissi, president of the nonproft Institute for Regulatory Science, and Michael ...
Conservation paleobiologists—scientists who use the fossil record to understand the evolutionary and ecological responses of present-day species to changes in their environment – are putting the dead to work.
A new review of the research in this emerging field provides examples of how the fossil record can help assess environmental impact, predict which species will be most vulnerable to environmental changes and provide guidelines for restoration.
The literature review by conservation paleobiologists Gregory P. Dietl of the Paleontological Research Institution ...
It is possible to construct a three-dimensional, 3D, face from flat 2D images, according to research published in the International Journal of Biometrics this month. The discovery could be used for biometrics in security applications or in forensic investigations.
Xin Guan and Hanqi Zhuang of Florida Atlantic University on Boca Raton explain how Biometrics, the technology of performing personal identification or authentication via an individual's physical attributes, is becoming an increasingly viable solution for identity management, information protection and homeland ...
LA JOLLA, CA – A team of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute and the University of Virginia has determined the structure of the protein package that delivers the genetic material of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to human cells.
The work is the culmination of studies carried out over the last decade looking at different portions of the cone-shaped container, or the capsid. The final piece of the puzzle, described in an article published in Nature on January 20, 2011, details the structure of the two ends of the cone.
"This paper is a real milestone ...
