Foldable antennas are required for small-sized electronic devices with high portability. Antennas on plastic substrates provide high flexibility and high sensitivity but are not foldable. Antennas on paper substrates are foldable, but their sensitivity is poor because of their coarse surfaces. In this paper, nanopapers with smooth surfaces and high foldability are fabricated from 30 nm wide cellulose nanofibers for use as foldable antenna substrates. Silver nanowires are then printed on the nanopapers to act as antenna lines. These nanopaper antennas with silver nanowires exhibit high sensitivity because of their smooth surfaces and high foldability because of their network structures. Also, their high foldability allows the mechanical tuning of their resonance points over a wide frequency range without using additional components such as condensers and coils. Nanopaper antennas with silver nanowires are therefore suitable for the realization of future foldable electronics.

Silver nanowires are printable and conductive, and are believed to be promising materials in the field of printed electronics. However, the resistivity of silver nanowire printed lines is higher than that of metallic particles or flakes even when sintered at high temperatures of 100-400 °C. Therefore, their applications have been limited to the replacement of transparent electrodes made from high-resistivity materials, such as doped metallic oxides, conductive polymers, carbon nanotubes, or graphenes. Here we report that using printed silver nanowire lines, signal losses obtained in the high-frequency radio were lower than those obtained using etched copper foil antennas, because their surfaces were much smoother than those of etched copper foil antennas. This was the case even though the resistivity of silver nanowire lines was 43-71 μΩ cm, which is much higher than that of etched copper foil (2 μΩ cm). When printed silver nanowire antennas were heated at 100 °C, they achieved signal losses that were much lower than those of silver paste antennas comprising microparticles, nanoparticles, and flakes. Furthermore, using a low temperature process, we succeeded in remotely controlling a commercialized radio-controlled car by transmitting a 2.45 GHz signal via a silver nanowire antenna printed on a polyethylene terephthalate film.

Printed antennas with low signal losses and fast response in high-frequency bands have been required. Here we reported on highly sensitive antennas using additive patterning of particle-free metallo-organic decomposition silver inks. Inkjet overprinting of metallo-organic decomposition inks onto copper foil and silver nanowire line produced antenna with mirror surfaces. As a result, the overprinted antennas decreased their return losses at 0.5-4.0 GHz and increased the speed of data communication in WiFi network.

No abstract

In a dedicated test setup at the Kamioka Observatory we studied pulse shape discrimination (PSD) in liquid xenon (LXe) for dark matter searches. PSD in LXe was based on the observation that scintillation light from electron events was emitted Preprint submitted to Elsevier 14 June 2011 over a longer period of time than that of nuclear recoil events, and our method used a simple ratio of early to total scintillation light emission in a single scintillation event.Requiring an efficiency of 50% for nuclear recoil retention we reduced the electron background to 7.7±1.1(stat)± 1.2 0.6 (sys)×10 −2 at energies between 4.8 and 7.2 keV ee and to 7.7±2.8(stat)± 2.5 2.8 (sys)×10 −3 at energies between 9.6 and 12 keV ee for a scintillation light yield of 20.9 p.e./keV. Further study was done by masking some of that light to reduce this yield to 4.6 p.e./keV, the same method results in an electron event reduction of 2.4±0.2(stat)± 0.3 0.2 (sys)×10 −1 for the lower of the energy regions above. We also observe that in contrast to nuclear recoils the fluctuations in our early to total ratio for electron events are larger than expected from statistical fluctuations.