Latest London Centre for Nanotechnology Stories
New nanoscale electronic state discovered on graphene sheets Researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) have discovered electronic stripes, called 'charge density waves', on the surface of the graphene sheets that make up a graphitic superconductor. This is the first time these stripes have been seen on graphene, and the finding is likely to have profound implications for the exploitation of this recently discovered material, which scientists believe will play a key role...
A new generation of high speed, silicon-based information technology has been brought a step closer by researchers in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at UCL and the London Centre for Nanotechnology. The team's research, published in next week's Nature Photonics journal, provides the first demonstration of an electrically driven, quantum dot laser grown directly on a silicon substrate (Si) with a wavelength (1300-nm) suitable for use in telecommunications.Silicon is the...
Researchers in Chicago and London have developed a method for controlling the properties of magnets that could be used to improve the storage capacity of next-generation computer hard drives.Magnets that can readily switch their polarity are widely used in the computer industry for data storage, but they present an engineering challenge: A magnet's polarity must be easily switched when writing data to memory, but be difficult to switch when storing or reading it.These conflicting requirements...
This week Nature Nanotechnology journal (October 12th) reveals how scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL are using a novel nanomechanical approach to investigate the workings of vancomycin, one of the few antibiotics that can be used to combat increasingly resistant infections such as MRSA. The researchers, led by Dr Rachel McKendry and Professor Gabriel Aeppli, developed ultra-sensitive probes capable of providing new insight into how antibiotics work, paving the...
