Latest Nanorod Stories

A new process for growing forests of manganese dioxide nanorods may lead to the next generation of high-performance capacitors. As an energy-storage material for batteries and capacitors, manganese dioxide has a lot going for it: it’s cheap, environmentally friendly and abundant. However, chemical capacitors made with manganese dioxide have lacked the power of the typical carbon-based physical capacitor. Michigan Technological University scientist Dennis Desheng Meng theorized that the...

Enhanced local electric fields are predominant in nonlinear optical properties, particularly in surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), which is a sensitive technique used for the detection of trace amounts of chemicals. Analysis of the electric fields around nanostructures indicates that they can provide a basic foundation to obtain greater SERS intensity. Professor ZHANG Zhongyue and his group from the College of Physics and Information Technology at Shaanxi Normal University have...

What do fireflies, nanorods, and Christmas lights have in common? Someday, consumers may be able to purchase multicolor strings of light that don’t need electricity or batteries to glow.  Scientists at Syracuse University found a new way to harness the natural light produced by fireflies (called bioluminescence) using nanoscience. Their breakthrough produces a system that is 20 to 30 times more efficient than those produced during previous experiments. It’s all about the size and...

Rice University lab develops starfruit-shaped nanorods for medical imaging, chemical sensing They look like fruit, and indeed the nanoscale stars of new research at Rice University have tasty implications for medical imaging and chemical sensing. Starfruit-shaped gold nanorods synthesized by chemist Eugene Zubarev and Leonid Vigderman, a graduate student in his lab at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative, could nourish applications that rely on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy...

Three-dimensional computer simulations reveal diffusional behavior Some of the recent advancements in nanotechnology depend critically on how nanoparticles move and diffuse on a surface or in a fluid under non-ideal to extreme conditions. Georgia Tech has a team of researchers dedicated to advancing this frontier. Rigoberto Hernandez, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, investigates these relationships by studying three-dimensional particle dynamics simulations on...

A relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods - rod-shaped semiconductor nanocrystals - to self-assemble into one-, two- and even three-dimensional macroscopic structures has been developed by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This technique should enable more effective use of nanorods in solar cells, magnetic storage devices and sensors. It should also help boost the electrical and...

Berkeley Lab Researchers Discover Why Pure Quantum Dots and Nanorods Shine Brighter To the lengthy list of serendipitous discoveries – gravity, penicillin, the New World – add this: Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered why a promising technique for making quantum dots and nanorods has so far been a disappointment. Better still, they’ve also discovered how to correct the problem. A team of...

Breakthrough in loading gold nanorods into cells could lead to new cancer treatment Rice University chemists have found a way to load more than 2 million tiny gold particles called nanorods into a single cancer cell. The breakthrough could speed development of cancer treatments that would use nanorods like tiny heating elements to cook tumors from the inside. The research appears online this week in the chemical journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. "The breast cancer...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a simple, scalable way to align gold nanorods, particles with optical properties that could be used for emerging biomedical imaging technologies.Aligning gold nanorods is important because they respond to light differently, depending on the direction in which the nanorods are pointed. To control the optical response of the nanorods, researchers want to ensure that all of the nanorods are aligned.The NC State researchers developed...