Improving materials used to make qubits is crucial to further progress in quantum information processing. Of particular interest are semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures that are expected to form the basis of topological quantum computing. We grow semiconductor indium antimonide nanowires that are coated with shells of tin of uniform thickness. No interdiffusion is observed at the interface between Sn and InSb. Tunnel junctions are prepared by in-situ shadowing. Despite the lack of lattice matching between Sn and InSb a 15 nm thick shell of tin is found to induce a hard superconducting gap, with superconductivity persisting in magnetic field up to 4T. A small island of Sn-InSb exhibits the two-electron charging effect. These findings suggest a less restrictive approach to fabricating superconducting and topological quantum circuits.

of trichromatic red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs and the other one is called phosphor-converted white light-emitting diodes (pc-WLEDs), which are assembled by coating RGB phosphor on ultraviolet (UV) LED chips or yellow phosphor on blue LED chips according to the chromaticity principles. Using the UV-LED chip as excitation source can directly obtain the white light emission generated from the phosphor layer. Thus, it is with flexible tunability for phosphor mixing but there is potential risk for UV leakage, while the blue LED chip is more mature in technology and of higher efficiency. Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of pc-WLEDs since the white-light illuminating device based on a blue InGaN LED chip have been brought to reality and gradually become the mainstream in commercial lighting market owing to high efficiency, packaging simplicity and effective cost. [5] Until now, inorganic phosphors such as aluminate, silicate and oxynitride are usually the options for pc-WLEDs due to mature technology. [6] But there are still several deficiencies for the current white lighting. First, the production of these inorganic phosphors poses increasing dependence on rare earth metal, which is the limited resource of the planet. And high-temperature solid-state synthesis is necessary for the industrial production of rare-earth phosphor, which causes high energy consumption. Additionally, the mixing and combination of several different color-emitting phosphors is necessary for well color-rendering broadband white light emission since the inorganic phosphors mentioned above are monochromatic. This may trigger phase separation and color instability during the application. Thus, searching for novel phosphor with fine colour-tunability covering the whole visible spectrum is under exploration recently.Luminescent metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are identified as a novel and ideal phosphor candidate for pc-WLEDs. During the past decades, MOFs have aroused extensive research interest in many applications including gas storage and separation, [7] catalysis, [8] light-emitting diodes, [9] fluorescent sensors, [10] nonlinear optics, [11] laser, [12] biomedicine [13] and medical imaging, [14] owing to their highly-designable porous architectures, large specific surface area and modifiable chemical functionalities. [15] While luminescent MOFs are always in the spotlight because of their fascinating and designable optical properties especially for white light emission. [16] As is shown in Figure 1, first of all, the emission properties of luminescent MOFs can be rationally designed through selective incorporation of diverse luminescent centres as building Phosphor-converted white light-emitting diodes (pc-WLEDs), as a main approach of solid-state white light illumination, have caught tremendous attention and achieved enormous progress in the past decades. Since the phosphor plays a dominating role in the final property of pc-WLEDs, the exploration for high-performance phosphor has become a challenging and targeted research t...

Morphology, chemical distribution and domain size in poly(ethylene terephthalate)/high-density poly(ethylene) (PET/HDPE) polymer blends of various ratios prepared with and without maleic anhydride have been analyzed with confocal Raman mapping and SEM. The ratioimage method introduced here allows us to obtain enhanced chemical images with higher contrast and reliability. Compatibility numbers (N c ) are calculated to evaluate the compatibility of the blends. The incompatible polymer blends show heterogeneous distribution with phase separation behavior, while the semicompatible blends prepared with maleic anhydride show much smaller subphase distributions with less distinct interphases. After the blending modification by maleic anhydride of only 0.5%, the viscosity status and dispersibility between PET and HDPE could be substantially improved, and the interactions that exist between the two phases have also been proved by ATR-FT-IR results. High-spatial-resolution confocal Raman mapping coupled with the ratioimage method provides a very attractive way to characterize the compatibility and phase behavior of the polymer blend through different blending methodologies.

Lead-halide perovskite nanocrystals (PeNCs) possess attractive linear and nonlinear optical properties. However, further adjusting their linear and nonlinear optical properties in a facile way remains great challenge due to the...

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