| Date | 8th, Jun 2020 |
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image: A nanobrush made by pulsed laser deposition of CeO2 and Y2O3 with dim and bright bands, respectively, is seen in cross-section with scanning transmission electron microscopy. view more
Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 8, 2020 -- A team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory synthesized a tiny structure with high surface area and discovered how its unique architecture drives ions across interfaces to transport energy or information. Their "nanobrush" contains bristles made of alternating crystal sheets with vertically aligned interfaces and plentiful pores.
"These are major technical accomplishments and may prove useful in advancing energy and information technologies," said ORNL's Ho Nyung Lee, who led the study published in Nature Communications. "This is an excellent example of work that is only feasible with the unique expertise and capabilities available at national labs."
The team's researchers hail from DOE national labs Oak Ridge and Argonne and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, University of South Carolina, Columbia, and University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The bristles of their multilayer crystal, or "supercrystal," are grown freestanding on a substrate. Former ORNL postdoctoral fellow Dongkyu Lee synthesized the supercrystals using pulsed laser epitaxy to deposit and build up alternating layers of fluorite-structure cerium oxide (CeO2) and bixbyite-structure yttrium oxide (Y2O3). Realization of the nanoscale bristles was made possible by the development of a novel precision synthesis approach that controls atom diffusion and aggregation during the growth of thin-film materials. Using
