It contains layers
of gold electrodes just a few hundred nanometres thick, sandwiched between layers of polyimide plastic to form a «nanomembrane».
Its interior is lined with a series
of gold electrodes, each dotted with thousands of identical short strands of DNA called aptamers.
Not exact matches
The
gold - polyurethane material could someday be used in the form
of implantable
electrodes in the brain for treating movement disorders or in the heart to help regulate cardiac activity.
A voltage applied between the
electrodes induced a type
of electrical attraction between the
gold pads and the metal rods, causing the rods to bridge adjacent
gold squares.
The
electrodes are made
of 4 mm
gold leads and individually insulated with 4 mm parylene.
Columbia researchers wired a single molecular cluster to
gold electrodes to show that it exhibits a quantized and controllable flow
of charge at room temperature.
«The
gold particles on top
of the substrate and between the self - healing
electrodes are able to «heal» cracks that could completely disconnect electrical connectivity,» said Prof. Haick.
The cylinders will be sandwiched between
electrodes of gold - plated silicon but also separated from them by thin spaces
of vacuum — the test masses will float on the
electrodes» electrostatic field.
To do this, they «chemically assembled a series
of double - dot SETs by anchoring two
gold nanoparticles between the nanogap
electrodes with alkanedithiol molecules to form a self - assembled monolayer,» explained Yutaka Majima, a professor in the Materials and Structures Laboratory at the Tokyo Institute
of Technology.
At both ends
of the resulting detector, they deposit
gold electrodes.
The team began their work by fabricating the
electrodes of the SET, which were separated by a nanometer scale gap, with an electroless
gold - plating technique.
At the annual meeting
of the American Physical Society and in the 12 March issue
of Physical Review Letters, Kociak and his colleagues at the French national research agency CNRS and the Russian Academy
of Sciences in Chernogolovka showed that empty nanotubes can also carry electron pairs between nonsuperconducting
electrodes (in this case, metal pads made from a sandwich
of aluminum oxide, platinum, and
gold).
The developed analysis method was applied to various single - molecule junctions, i.e., those
of 1,4 - butanediamine (DAB), pyrazine (PY), 4,4» - bipyridine (BPY), and fullerene (C60), sandwiched by
gold electrodes, and the different molecular - dependent electronic and structural fluctuations were demonstrated.
The preparation
of the described biosensors is expensive and complex, though: the
electrodes are made
of a biocompatible and electrically conductive material, such as
gold or platinum.
The researchers placed particles
of gold ranging in diameter from 15 to 30 nanometers in a fluid suspension within a thin chamber located between two
electrodes.
In 2003, however, researchers at the University
of Groningen in the Netherlands who mounted single molecules
of diarylethene between
gold electrodes found that, even though the switches could be turned off by visible light, they could not then be turned back on by ultraviolet.
Researchers at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis have invented a new ultralow power technique to trap nanoparticles in the sub-10 nm gaps between two
gold electrodes.
In Kennedy's
electrode design, the three
gold wires that conduct signals from the brain terminate inside the tiny, cone - shaped tip
of a glass micropipette.
A
gold electrode coated with nanoclusters
of indium phosphide absorb incoming photons
of light (that is the wavy line marked «hv» in the image).