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In this paper, distinctive indium-tin-oxide (ITO) nanorods are employed to serve as buried electrodes for polymer-based solar cells. The embedded nanoelectrodes allow three-dimensional conducting pathways for low-mobility holes, offering a highly scaffolded cell architecture in addition to bulk heterojunctions. As a result, the power conversion efficiency of a polymer cell with ITO nanoelectrodes is increased to about 3.4% and 4.4% under one-sun and five-sun illumination conditions, respectively, representing an enhancement factor of up to ∼10% and 36% compared to a conventional counterpart. Also, the corresponding device lifetime is prolonged twice as much to about 110 min under five-sun illumination.

This paper presents a novel and mass-producible technique to fabricate indium-tin-oxide (ITO) nanorods which serve as an omnidirectional transparent conductive layer (TCL) for InGaN/GaN light emitting diodes (LEDs). The characteristic nanorods, prepared by oblique electron-beam evaporation in a nitrogen ambient, demonstrate high optical transmittance (T>90%) for the wavelength range of 450nm to 900nm. The light output power of a packaged InGaN/GaN LED with the incorporated nanorod layer is increased by 35.1% at an injection current of 350mA, compared to that of a conventional LED. Calculations based on a finite difference time domain (FDTD) method suggest that the extraction enhancement factor can be further improved by increasing the thickness of the nanorod layer, indicating great potential to enhance the luminous intensity of solid-state lighting devices using ITO nanorod structures.

In this paper, we present evidence of balanced electron and hole transport in polymer-fullerene based solar cells by means of embedded indium-tin-oxide nanoelectrodes. Enabled by a controllable electrochemical deposition, the individual nanoelectrodes are uniformly enclosed by a poly͑3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene͒ hole-conducting layer, allowing a relatively short route for holes to reach the anode and hence increasing the effective hole mobility. Consequently, the power conversion efficiency and photogenerated current are maximized with a deposition condition of 50 C, where the ratio of the electron to hole mobility is nearly unity.

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Lapatinib, a dual EGFR/HER2 tyrosine kinase inhibitor, has been shown to improve the survival rate of patients with advanced HER2-positive breast cancers. However, the off-target activity of lapatinib in inducing EGFR expression without tyrosine kinase activity was demonstrated to render HER2-negative breast cancer cells more metastatic, suggesting a limitation to the therapeutic effectiveness of this dual inhibitor in HER2-heterogeneous tumors. Therefore, targeting EGFR expression may be a feasible approach to improve the anticancer efficiency of lapatinib-based therapy. Inhibition of HDAC has been previously reported to epigenetically suppress EGFR protein expression. In this study, however, our data indicated that treatment with HDAC inhibitors trichostatin A (TSA), but not suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) or HDAC siRNA, can attenuate both protein and mRNA expressions of EGFR in lapatinib-treated triple-negative breast cancer cells, suggesting that TSA may suppress EGFR expression independently of HDAC inhibition. Nevertheless, TSA reduced EGFR 3′UTR activity and induced the gene expression of microRNA-7, a known EGFR-targeting microRNA. Furthermore, treatment with microRNA-7 inhibitor attenuated TSA-mediated EGFR suppression. These results suggest that TSA induced microRNA-7 expression to downregulate EGFR expression in an HDAC-independent manner.

As silicon photovoltaics evolve towards thin-wafer technologies, efficient optical absorption for the near-infrared wavelengths has become particularly challenging. In this work, we present a solution that employs combined micro-and nano-scale surface textures to increase light harvesting in the near-infrared for crystalline silicon photovoltaics, and discuss the associated antireflection and scattering mechanisms. The surface textures are achieved by uniformly depositing a layer of indium-tin-oxide nanowhiskers on micro-grooved silicon substrates using electron-beam evaporation. The nanowhiskers facilitate optical transmission in the near-infrared by functioning as impedance matching layers with effective refractive indices gradually varying from 1 to 1.3. Materials with such unique refractive index characteristics are not readily available in nature. As a result, the solar cell with combined textures achieves over 90% external quantum efficiencies for a broad wavelength range of 460-980 nm, which is crucial to the development of advanced thin-substrate silicon solar cells.

We investigate threshold current temperature dependence of electrically injected quantum-dot (QD) photonic crystal (PC) surface-emitting lasers (SELs) with respect to wavelength detuning between QD gain peak and PC cavity resonance. The lasing emissions cover wavelengths from 1283 nm to 1318 nm. Almost infinite characteristic temperature is realized at certain temperature range for PCSEL with large negative gain-cavity detuning. Moreover, band-edge lasing mode is identified in our "PC slab-on-substrate" structure, and its far-field distribution is characterized as doughnut-shaped beam with azimuthal polarization.