Silver crystals: These octahedral silver nanoparticles suspended in ethanol are assembling into a large crystal. The density of the particles, which changes from top to bottom, determines what colors pass through.
Credit: Peidong Yang
New publications, experiments and breakthroughs in materials science--and what they mean.
Self-Assembling Optics
Nanoparticles form sophisticated devices
Source: "Self-Organized Silver Nanoparticles for Three-Dimensional Plasmonic Crystals"
Peidong Yang et al.
Nano Letters 8: 4033-4038
Results: Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peidong Yang, have shown that silver nanoparticles with very regular octahedral shapes pack together under the influence of gravity to form large crystals. The crystals' optical properties can be varied by changing the amount of time the nanoparticles have to pack together, which affects the spacing between them.
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This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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