By making a ceramic with a metal alloy of titanium dioxide, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has made a powerful tool for finding materials for use in nanoscale photonics.
In a paper published online on Monday, the researchers show that by making this metal alloy, they could make a photocatomer of a semiconductor, which could help the world fight global warming and improve its economy.
“It’s a new way to do research in nanotechnology that is really exciting,” says Daniel Karp, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab’s Materials Sciences Division who led the research.
“There’s a lot of interest in this field right now.
This paper really lays out the potential of making photocatoms.”
The researchers made a titanium dioxide semiconductor in a process called in2o7 photocatalysis.
The material they used was a mixture of two other materials: titanium dioxide and a metal known as nickel.
A catalyst, called an iron oxide photocatterer, is a metal that reacts with the titanium dioxide to make an oxygen atom.
The titanium dioxide reacts with a catalyst to form a silicon dioxide.
The two metal elements, the catalyst and the silicon dioxide, are bonded together.
This bond is then broken, allowing the titanium to separate from the nickel and the oxygen atom, allowing it to pass through the photocatalyser and pass to the nanocar.
The carbon atom of the catalyst stays behind and binds to the carbon atoms of the nanocluster of titanium oxide, allowing its formation of a layer of carbon nanotubes called an octanoyl-dithiothiophene (ODT).
This layer then forms a carbon nanofibrous called carbon-nanotube.
The resulting photocatalo catalyst has a photocurrent of roughly 1 million electron volts per nanosecond, which is twice as fast as the best existing semiconductor photocataper.
The researchers showed that the new material could be used to make nanoparticles in nanocrystals, which are formed in a vacuum from an organic material.
The process could also be used for making nano-scale materials, such as carbon nanoshells.
“The fact that we can make these nanoparticles by using titanium dioxide instead of nickel makes this a big deal,” says lead author and PhD student Alex Pasternak.
“If you can make carbon nanocarestals by using nanocrystal-like materials, you could be able to make nanoscales of these nanoporous materials.”
The research is described in the journal Nature Materials.
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