A photochemical method has been exploited for the very fast synthesis of electrically conductive Pd nanowires on DNA. The nanowires have an average diameter of 55-75 nm and a length of approximately 3-5 mum. Our result signifies that the DNA acts both as a reducing agent as well as nonspecific capping agent for the Pd nanowire synthesis. The current voltage (I-V) characterization indicates that the nanowires are continuous and exhibit Ohmic behavior with low contact resistance. The deposition is highly selective on DNA only. Our experiment indicates that Pd nanowires may be valuable as interconnections in nanoscale integrated circuitry, functional nanodevices and in optoelectronics.

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This paper presents a multi-stage, semi-automated procedure that can expedite the morphology analysis of nanoparticles. Material scientists have long conjectured that morphology of nanoparticles has a profound impact on the properties of the hosting material but a bottleneck is the lack of a reliable and automated morphology analysis of the particles based on their image measurements. This paper attempts to ll in this critical void. One particular challenge in nano morphology analysis is how to analyze the overlapped nanoparticles, a problem not well addressed by the existing methods but eectively tackled by our proposed method. Our proposed method entails multiple stages of operations, executed sequentially, and is considered semi-automated due to the inclusion of a semi-supervised clustering step. Our method was applied to several images of gold nanoparticles, producing the needed statistical characterization of their morphology.

Pt nanowires with variable lengths have been synthesized by the reduction of Pt(IV) ions using alkaline 2,7-DHN in CTAB micellar media under 3 h of UV photoirradiation. The synthesized Pt nanowires are stable for more than 3 months in ambient conditions. The particles' morphology can be tuned by simply changing the surfactant-to-metal ion molar ratios and other reaction parameters. The mechanisms of the nanowire formation and effects of different reaction parameters are studied in detail. The resulting nanowires are found to be electrically conductive and maintain Ohm's law with the electrodes. Moreover, they serve as a good catalyst for the reduction of organic dye molecules in the presence of NaBH 4 . The catalysis rate was compared by considering the electron-transfer process during reduction. The present method would lead to a quick process for the synthesis of other monometallic and composite nanowires with variable lengths. The Pt nanowires offer promising applications in different types of organic and inorganic catalysis reactions, nanoelectronics, and biomedical applications.

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While reactions driven by mechanical force or stress can be labeled mechanochemical, those specifically occurring at a sliding interface inherit the name tribochemical, which stems from the study of friction and wear: tribology. Increased perception of tribochemical reactions has been gained through technological advancement, and the development of new applications remains on-going. This surprising physico-kinetic process offers great potential in novel reaction pathways for synthesis techniques and nanoparticle interactions, and it could prove to be a powerful cross-disciplinary research area among chemists, engineers, and physicists. In this review article, a survey of the history and recent usage of tribochemical reaction pathways is presented, with a focus on forging new compounds and materials with this sustainable synthesis methodology. In addition, an overview of tribochemistry’s current utility as a synthesis pathway is given and compared to that of traditional mechanochemistry.

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