There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Although gold is the subject of one of the most ancient themes of investigation in science, its renaissance now leads to an exponentially increasing number of publications, especially in the context of emerging nanoscience and nanotechnology with nanoparticles and self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). We will limit the present review to gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), also called gold colloids. AuNPs are the most stable metal nanoparticles, and they present fascinating aspects such as their assembly of multiple types involving materials science, the behavior of the individual particles, size-related electronic, magnetic and optical properties (quantum size effect), and their applications to catalysis and biology. Their promises are in these fields as well as in the bottom-up approach of nanotechnology, and they will be key materials and building block in the 21st century. Whereas the extraction of gold started in the 5th millennium B.C. near Varna (Bulgaria) and reached 10 tons per year in Egypt around 1200-1300 B.C. when the marvelous statue of Touthankamon was constructed, it is probable that “soluble” gold appeared around the 5th or 4th century B.C. in Egypt and China. In antiquity, materials were used in an ecological sense for both aesthetic and curative purposes. Colloidal gold was used to make ruby glass 293 Chem. Rev. 2004, 104, 293−346

Gold nanoparticles: assembly, supramolecular chemistry, quantum-size-related properties, and applications toward biology, catalysis, and nanotechnology.

Multilayer films of organic compounds on solid surfaces have been studied for more than 60 years because they allow fabrication of multicomposite molecular assemblies of tailored architecture. However, both the Langmuir-Blodgett technique and chemisorption from solution can be used only with certain classes of molecules. An alternative approach—fabrication of multilayers by consecutive adsorption of polyanions and polycations—is far more general and has been extended to other materials such as proteins or colloids. Because polymers are typically flexible molecules, the resulting superlattice architectures are somewhat fuzzy structures, but the absence of crystallinity in these films is expected to be beneficial for many potential applications.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/277/5330/1232.full.pdf

Fuzzy Nanoassemblies: Toward Layered Polymeric Multicomposites

There is intense interest in graphene in fields such as physics, chemistry, and materials science, among others. Interest in graphene's exceptional physical properties, chemical tunability, and potential for applications has generated thousands of publications and an accelerating pace of research, making review of such research timely. Here is an overview of the synthesis, properties, and applications of graphene and related materials (primarily, graphite oxide and its colloidal suspensions and materials made from them), from a materials science perspective.

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Graphene and Graphene Oxide: Synthesis, Properties, and Applications

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) offer the possibilities to design solar cells with a large flexibility in shape, color, and transparency. DSC research groups have been established around the worl ...

/pdf/dye-sensitized-solar-cells-50b0w2bhsr.pdf

Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, using 13.5 nm radiation, is a prominent candidate for next generation manufacturing. Our main effort has recently focused on metal organic cluster photoresists, including both Zr and Hf metal oxides, both relatively low EUV absorbing metals. However, integration of high EUV absorption elements is now considered to be a more promising route to further improve lithographic performance under EUV radiation. Here, we report lithography of zinc oxide-based metal organic cluster photoresists, and EUV patterning below 15 nm. The lithographic performance of this and other metal oxides is described and etch characteristics discussed.

Metal organic cluster photoresists: new metal oxide systems

New Chemical Processing Technique Deposits Good Quality TiN Thin Films for Microelectronic Applications

Crystalline aluminum nitride thin films (~ 1200 A) were prepared via nitridation of amorphous aluminum oxide and characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, oxygen resonance, Auger depth-profile analysis and ellipsometry. Precursor chemistry, heating rate, nitridation temperature and nitridation time were varied to explore the competition between densification, crystallization and nitridation. Oxygen content in the films decreased with increasing nitriding temperature or nitriding time. Heating rate was determined to have minimal effect on the oxygen content for the parameters evaluated. A modified Kissinger analysis of DTA data for the crystallization of α-Al2O3 yielded an effective activation energy of ~104 kcal/mol.

Sol Gel Derived Aluminum Nitride Thin Films Via the Nitridation of Alumina

A new generation of substrate materials with low dielectric permittivity have been developed. These new ceramic-based nanocomposites consist of a quasi two-dimensional, multilayered structure realized by the intercalation of molecular species into the galleries of a host lattice. The materials have been characterized by x-ray diffraction, electronic and infrared spectroscopy. The relative permittivities vary between 2.5 and 4 at 1 MHz. The new hybrids can be processed at relatively low temperatures (below 350°C) and allow for step coverage of submicron structures.

New Multilayered Materials with Low Dielectric Permittivity for VLSI Applications

http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S0141391022000581/pdf/S0141391022000581.pdf

Emmanuel P. Giannelis

Papers

Metal organic cluster photoresists: new metal oxide systems

New Chemical Processing Technique Deposits Good Quality TiN Thin Films for Microelectronic Applications

Sol Gel Derived Aluminum Nitride Thin Films Via the Nitridation of Alumina

New Multilayered Materials with Low Dielectric Permittivity for VLSI Applications

Influence of photooxidation on ionic reversible interactions of ionic poly(ether urethane)/silica hybrids