The construction of soft and processable organic material able to display metallic conduction properties-a large density of freely moving charges-is a major challenge for electronics. Films of doped conjugated polymers are widely used as semiconductor devices, but metallic-type transport in the bulk of such materials remains extremely rare. On the other hand, single-walled carbon nanotubes can exhibit remarkably low contact resistances with related large currents, but are intrinsically very difficult to isolate and process. Here, we describe the self-assembly of supramolecular organic nanowires between two metallic electrodes, from a solution of triarylamine derivative, under the simultaneous action of light and electric field triggers. They exhibit a combination of large conductivity values (>5 × 10(3) S m(-1)) and a low interface resistance (<2 × 10(-4) Ω m). Moreover, the resistance of nanowires in series with metal interfaces systematically decreases when the temperature is lowered to 1.5 K, revealing an intrinsic metallic behaviour.

In the last two decades, great efforts have been made in the development of 3D cadmium–zinc–telluride (CZT) detectors operating at room temperature for gamma-ray spectroscopic imaging. This work presents the spectroscopic performance of new high-resolution CZT drift strip detectors, recently developed at IMEM-CNR of Parma (Italy) in collaboration with due2lab (Italy). The detectors (19.4 mm × 19.4 mm × 6 mm) are organized into collecting anode strips (pitch of 1.6 mm) and drift strips (pitch of 0.4 mm) which are negatively biased to optimize electron charge collection. The cathode is divided into strips orthogonal to the anode strips with a pitch of 2 mm. Dedicated pulse processing analysis was performed on a wide range of collected and induced charge pulse shapes using custom 32-channel digital readout electronics. Excellent room-temperature energy resolution (1.3% FWHM at 662 keV) was achieved using the detectors without any spectral corrections. Further improvements (0.8% FWHM at 662 keV) were also obtained through a novel correction technique based on the analysis of collected-induced charge pulses from anode and drift strips. These activities are in the framework of two Italian research projects on the development of spectroscopic gamma-ray imagers (10–1000 keV) for astrophysical and medical applications.

Thin films of poly(2,5-bis(3-dodecyl-2-yl)-thieno[3,2-b]thiophene) (C12-PBTTT) polymer under electrolyte gating and doping are investigated as model systems for organic thin films devices approaching the metallic side of a metal-insulator (M-I) transition. For the most doped samples, with an estimated density reaching 8 × 1020 cm−3 holes and a conductivity exceeding 1000 S cm−1, a positive high-field magnetoconductance is found in a limited temperature range window and only when the field is perpendicular to the sample plane. This signature of weak localization, combined with indications of finite zero-temperature conductivity, allows us to identify delocalized metallic-like transport in these thin films, even though the conductivity decreases when cooling down the samples.