NEWS

resistance in the wiring, explains team leader Richard Haglund from Vanderbilt University, US. Both the heat and the real
estate are major issues in current integrated
circuit design.
The switches, detailed in Nano Letters
[Appavoo, et al., Nano Lett. (2014),
doi:10.1021/nl4044828], contain nanoparticles of vanadium dioxide deposited on a glass
surface and coated with a mesh of gold
nanoparticles.
VO2 can switch back and forth between
an opaque, metallic phase and a transparent, semiconducting phase, and the team
had previously achieved this switching by
shining a laser directly on the bare material.
But the team wanted to reduce the amount
of energy needed to flick VO2s switch.

Materials Today  Volume 17, Number 5  June 2014

When hit by brief pulses from an ultrafast

laser, the gold nanoparticles in the new
switch generate hot electrons. These jump
into the VO2 and cause a phase change. The
switch can be turned on and off trillions of
times a second, and the transformation
takes between one fifth and one tenth as
much energy compared to shining a laser
on the bare material. Laser-generated
electrons in hybrid materials combining
metal and vanadium dioxide nanoparticles
trigger the insulator-to-metal transition in
the hybrid at substantially lower energy
than is possible by laser excitation of
vanadium dioxide alone, Haglund told
Materials Today.
As well as being smaller than electronbased analogues, the team say their

switches are also much smaller than the

current generation of optical switches. They
are just 200 nm in diameter.
Applications could include optical transistors and ultrafast optical limiters - materials that can deflect or reflect intense light
to protect sensitive optical detectors,
Haglund says.
Next, the team plan to use lithographic
fabrication to further develop the hybrid
nanomaterials. They will also conduct more
optical experiments to improve understanding of the hot-electron dynamics
and measure the coupling between the plasmons excited in the gold nanoparticles and
the strongly correlated electrons in
the VO2.
Nina Notman

Diamond nanoparticles improve heat transfer

With thermal fluids increasingly used to
reduce wear on components and tools,
research into balancing how such fluids flow
with their thermal transport properties
could offer benefit the design and production of components in the electronics,
energy, medical, biopharmaceuticals, automotive and nuclear sectors. Many traditional
thermal fluids have shortcomings, due to
factors including stability, viscosity, surface
charge and layering, while others are thin
and flow easily but are not great conductors
of heat.
However, a team from Rice University
investigating nanofluids for heat transfer
has demonstrated that a mixture of diamond
nanoparticles (6 nm) and mineral oil could
offer real improvements for applications that
depend on the control of heat. Their study,
reported in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
[Taha-Tijerina, et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces (2014), doi:10.1021/am405575t], combined extremely low concentrations of
diamond nanoparticles (<0.1 wt.%) with

mineral oil to assess thermal conductivity;

temperature-dependent studies were also
performed to understand how temperature
might affect its physical properties, such as
viscosity.
With low concentrations ensuring flow
is not limited but still benefits from heat
transfer and storage properties, the mixture
enhanced nanofluids containing higher
amounts of oxide, nitride or carbide ceramics,
metals, semiconductors and other composites. Nanodiamonds were the best additive
because they have similar properties that
make bulk diamond useful for heat transfer.
As researcher Jaime Taha-Tijerina points out,
The great properties of nanodiamonds
lubricity, high thermal conductivity and electrical resistivity and stability are quite
impressive. We found we could combine
very small amounts with conventional fluids
and get extraordinary thermal transport
without significant problems in viscosity.
The very low filler fraction of nanoparticles significantly helped the thermal

performance of the nanofluid, from experience, Taha-Tijerina knows the importance

of insulating fluid in maintaining and
prolonging the life of insulating cardboard
and components for electrical/electronic
devices. As the cost of fluid is paramount,
introducing small amounts of nanoparticles works to improve thermal performance without diminishing electrical
properties, and helps in optimizing design,
reducing the size of components and
products with less need for expensive
materials such as copper, aluminum and
steel.
The team is now looking to expand
research into other areas and for components or products where environmentally
friendly materials are practical, for which
nanodiamonds being inert, chemically
stable and biocompatible are also suitable.
In addition, they plan to further explore the
characterization and performance evaluation for these materials.
Laurie Donaldson

electrons and photons is key to electrical

illumination, solar energy conversion and
light detection alike. Unfortunately, until
now it has been difficult to couple light
into thin layered semiconductor systems.
The rules of quantum mechanics prohibit

photons of specific polarization from interacting with the electrons of the semiconductor system. Light which hits the layered
surface head-on, cannot influence the electron in the semiconductor. The team, however, has now demonstrated that a meta

Lets get meta physical

An extremely thin, periodic meta material
that incorporates quantum cascade structures has been devised by researchers at
Vienna University of Technology.
Karl Unterrainer and colleagues were
fully aware that the subtle interplay between
212