Thin-film field-effect transistor is a fundamental component behind various mordern electronics. The development of stretchable electronics poses fundamental challenges in developing new electronic materials for stretchable thin-film transistors that are mechanically compliant and solution processable. Here we report the fabrication of transparent thin-film transistors that behave like an elastomer film. The entire fabrication is carried out by solution-based techniques, and the resulting devices exhibit a mobility of ∼30 cm2 V−1 s−1, on/off ratio of 103–104, switching current >100 μA, transconductance >50 μS and relative low operating voltages. The devices can be stretched by up to 50% strain and subjected to 500 cycles of repeated stretching to 20% strain without significant loss in electrical property. The thin-film transistors are also used to drive organic light-emitting diodes. The approach and results represent an important progress toward the development of stretchable active-matrix displays.

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Light strongly interacts with structures that are of a similar scale to its wavelength, typically nanoscale features for light in the visible spectrum. However, the optical response of these nanostructures is usually fixed during the fabrication. Phase change materials offer a way to tune the properties of these structures in nanoseconds. Until now, phase change active photonics has used materials that strongly absorb visible light, which limits their application in the visible spectrum. In contrast, Sb2S3 is an underexplored phase change material with a bandgap that can be tuned in the visible spectrum from 2.0 to 1.7 eV. This tuneable bandgap is deliberately coupled to an optical resonator such that it responds dramatically in the visible spectrum to Sb2S3 reversible structural phase transitions. It is shown that this optical response can be triggered both optically and electrically. High‐speed reprogrammable Sb2S3 based photonic devices, such as those reported here, are likely to have wide applications in future intelligent photonic systems, holographic displays, and microspectrometers.

Sparse covariance selection problems can be formulated as log-determinant (log-det) semidefinite programming (SDP) problems with large numbers of linear constraints. Standard primal-dual interior-point methods that are based on solving the Schur complement equation would encounter severe computational bottlenecks if they are applied to solve these SDPs. In this paper, we consider a customized inexact primal-dual path-following interior-point algorithm for solving large scale log-det SDP problems arising from sparse covariance selection problems. Our inexact algorithm solves the large and ill-conditioned linear system of equations in each iteration by a preconditioned iterative solver. By exploiting the structures in sparse covariance selection problems, we are able to design highly effective preconditioners to efficiently solve the large and illconditioned linear systems. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real covariance selection problems show that our algorithm is highly efficient and outperforms other existing algorithms.keywords: log-determinant semidefinite programming, sparse inverse covariance selection, inexact interior point method, inexact search direction, iterative solver

Materials that exhibit large and rapid switching of their optical properties in the visible spectrum hold the key to color-changing devices. Antimony trisulfide (Sb2S3) is a chalcogenide material that exhibits large refractive index changes of ~1 between crystalline and amorphous states. However, little is known about its ability to endure multiple switching cycles, its capacity for recording high-resolution patterns, nor the optical properties of the crystallized state. Unexpectedly, we show that crystalline Sb2S3 films that are just 20 nm thick can produce substantial birefringent phase retardation. We also report a high-speed rewritable patterning approach at subdiffraction resolutions (>40,000 dpi) using 780-nm femtosecond laser pulses. Partial reamorphization is demonstrated and then used to write and erase multiple microscale color images with a wide range of colors over a ~120-nm band in the visible spectrum. These solid-state, rapid-switching, and ultrahigh-resolution color-changing devices could find applications in nonvolatile ultrathin displays.

Photonic crystals (PCs) have been widely applied in the anticounterfeiting field according to their easily tunable and angle-dependent structural colors. However, most studies are now focused on single-layer PCs assembled from monodisperse colloidal spheres, which have only one bandgap. Here, we prepared bilayer photonic crystal films by choosing 250 and 330 nm silica spheres as the bottom and top layer, respectively. The effect of the incident angle on the bandgap of PCs was investigated and the results showed that the bandgap of the bilayer PCs was incident angle dependent the structure exhibited two strong bandgaps within small incident angles, while as the incident angle increases, both the bandgaps blue-shifted and more importantly, the bandgap of the bottom layer disappeared with a further increase in the incident angle. Furthermore, with the delicate design of the thickness of the top layer, this bilayer structure selectively displayed the structural colors of the bottom layer, overlap colors of both the top and the bottom layer, and the color of only the top layer, respectively. By changing the incident angle, the color circulation from green to magenta, orange, yellow, and green again was realized. The realization of the controllable color tunability further motived us towards the patterning of the bilayer PCs, which showed promising potential in the anticounterfeiting field.

Modulation of thermal radiation is an essential element of infrared sensing and imaging, thermal infrared light sources, camouflage, and thermophotovoltaics. Recently, tuneable thermal emission of nanophotonic structures has been demonstrated. However, most of the current strategies involve controlling single spectral thermal emission in the far‐infrared region, and blue shifting their resonances to the shorter wavelength region is rarely explored. Moreover, fast modulation of multispectral thermal radiation remains challenging. In this work, the dynamic control of multispectral thermal emission from 2 to 4 µm from an ultrathin reconfigurable metasurface is experimentally presented based on Au/SiO2/Ge2Sb2Te5/Au multilayer. This metadevice contains several integrated thermal emitters of various wavelengths, each of which consists of gold (Au) squares array with different widths. A tuning of multispectral absorptivity (emissivity) can be achieved by transiting the state of Ge2Sb2Te5 from amorphous to crystalline. A heat‐transfer model is developed to demonstrate that the reversible switching of multispectral thermal emission can be achieved in just 300 ns. The experimental demonstration along with the theoretical framework lays the foundation for designing high‐speed reconfigurable multispectral thermal emitters, which, as expected, will initiate a new route to thermal engineering.

A water-based AgNW ink for large-scale flexible transparent conductive films was developed via a systematic research procedure.