Printing electrodes for P(VDF-TrFE-CTFE) actuators using a consumer grade inkjet printer

To facilitate smart material transducer research and application, it is important to develop fabrication processes that are widely accessible and compatible with additive manufacturing (AM) techniques. This work addresses inkjet printing and material selection in the fabrication of bending cantilever actuators based on the P(VDF-TrFE-CTFE)...

Recording Neuronal Activity On Chip with Segmented 3D Microelectrode Arrays

We present preliminary recordings on chip of three-dimensional (3D) electric neuronal activity from cultures of cortical neurons derived from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). The recordings were obtained through 3D microelectrode arrays (MEAs) composed of truncated, 90 μm-high Si micropyramids endowed with multiple, electrically...

Dual-Gate Fet-Based Charge Sensor Enhanced by In-Situ Electrode Decoration in a MEMS Organs-On-Chip Platform

Continuous monitoring of tissue microphysiology is a key enabling feature of the organ-on-chip (OoC) approach for drug screening and disease modeling. Sensing charged species in OoC tissue microenvironments is thereby essential. However, the inherently small (i.e., cm) size of OoC devices poses the challenging requirement to integrate...

Revealing operando transformation dynamics in individual Li-ion electrode crystallites using X-Ray Microbeam Diffraction

For the development of next-generation batteries it is important to understand the structural changes in electrodes under realistic non-equilibrium conditions. With microbeam X-ray diffraction it is possible to probe many individual electrode grains concurrently under non-equilibrium conditions in realistic battery systems. This makes it...

Energy deposition characteristics of nanosecond dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators: Influence of dielectric material

An experimental study aimed at the characterization of energy deposition of nanosecond Dielectric Barrier Discharge (ns-DBD) plasma actuators was carried out. Special attention was given on the effect of the thickness and material used for dielectric barrier. The selected materials for this study were polyimide film (Kapton), polyamide based...

I-V characteristics of in-plane and out-of-plane strained edge-hydrogenated armchair graphene nanoribbons

The effects of tensile strain on the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of hydrogenated-edge armchair graphene nanoribbons are investigated by using DFT theory. The strain is introduced in two different ways related to the two types of systems studied in this work: in-plane strained systems (A) and out-of-plane strained systems due to bending...

Does a coupling capacitor enhance the charge balance during neural stimulation? An empirical study

Due to their DC-blocking characteristic, coupling capacitors are widely used to prevent potentially harmful charge buildup at the electrode–tissue interface. Although the capacitors can be an effective safety measure, it often seems overlooked that coupling capacitors actually introduce an offset voltage over the electrode–tissue interface as...

Improved Nb SIS devices for heterodyne mixers between 700?GHz and 1.3?THz with NbTiN transmission lines using a normal metal energy relaxation layer

In this paper, we demonstrate experimentally the implementation of a niobium-trilayer junction with an aluminum-oxide tunnel barrier, embedded in a high-gap superconducting niobium-titanium-nitride circuit. Previously reported heating by quasiparticle trapping is removed by inserting a normal metal layer of gold between the niobium junction and...

Thermal conductivity of low temperature grown vertical carbon nanotube bundles measured using the three-? method

The thermal conductivity of as-grown vertical multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNT) bundles fabricated at low temperature (500?°C) was measured using a vertical 3?-method. For this, CNT were selectively grown inside an oxide opening and sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The validity of the method was confirmed by both measurements as...

Room-temperature stability of Pt nanogaps formed by self-breaking

We present a method to make Pt nanometer-spaced electrodes that are free of metallic particles and stable at ambient conditions. The nanogaps are fabricated using feedback-controlled electromigration to form few-atom contacts. When performing this procedure at elevated temperatures (>420?K), the Pt contacts undergo self-breaking so that...

Bias-dependent contact resistance in rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors

The authors report a systematic study of the bias-dependent contact resistance in rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors with Ni, Co, Cu, Au, and Pt electrodes. They show that the reproducibility in the values of contact resistance strongly depends on the metal, ranging from a factor of 2 for Ni to more than three orders of magnitude...

Self-breaking in planar few-atom Au constrictions for nanometer-spaced electrodes

The authors present results on electromigrated Au nanojunctions broken near the conductance quantum of 77.5??S. At room temperature it is found that wires, initially narrowed by an actively-controlled electromigration technique down to a few conductance quanta, continue to narrow after removing the applied voltage. Separate electrodes form as...

Reproducible low contact resistance in rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors with nickel electrodes

We have investigated the contact resistance of rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors (FETs) with nickel electrodes by performing scaling experiments on devices with channel length ranging from 200 nm up to 300??m. We find that the contact resistance can be as low as 100???cm with narrowly spread fluctuations. For comparison, we have...

Nanofabrication of electrodes with sub-5 nm spacing for transport experiments on single molecules and metal clusters

Deposition and atomic force microscopy of individual phthalocyanine polymers between nanofabricated electrodes

Towards electrical transport on single molecules

Electrical transport in monolayers of phthalocyanine molecular wires and AFM imaging of a single wire bridging two electrodes