Conductive hydrogels (CHs) have been highlighted in the design of flexible strain sensors and stretchable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) on the basis of their excellent physicochemical properties such as large stretchability and high conductivity. Nevertheless, the incident freezing and drying behaviors of CHs by using water solvent as the dispersion medium limit their application scopes significantly. Herein, an environment tolerant and ultrastretchable organohydrogel is demonstrated by a simple solvent‐replacement strategy, in which the partial water in the as‐synthesized polyacrylamide/montmorillonite/carbon nanotubes hydrogel is replaced with the glycerol, leading to excellent temperature toleration (−60 to 60 °C) and good stability (30 days under normal environment) without sacrificing the stretchability and conductivity. The organohydrogel exhibits an ultrawide strain sensing range (0–4196%) with a high sensitivity of 8.5, enabling effective detection and discrimination of human activities that are gentle or drastic under various conditions. Furthermore, the organohydrogel is assembled in a single‐electrode TENG, which displays excellent energy harvesting ability even under a stretchability of 500% and robustness to directly power wearable electronics in harsh cold conditions. This work inspires a simple route for multifunctional organohydrogel and promises the practical application of flexible and self‐powered wearable devices in extreme environments.
Colloidal cadmium chalcogenide nanosheets with atomically precise thickness of a few atomic layers and size of 10-100 nm are two-dimensional (2D) quantum well materials with strong and precise quantum confinement in the thickness direction. Despite their many advantageous properties, excitons in these and other 2D metal chalcogenide materials are short-lived due to large radiative and nonradiative recombination rates, hindering their applications as light harvesting and charge separation/transport materials for solar energy conversion. We showed that these problems could be overcome in type-II CdSe/CdTe core/crown heteronanosheets (with CdTe crown laterally extending on the CdSe nanosheet core). Photoluminesence excitation measurement revealed that nearly all excitons generated in the CdSe and CdTe domains localized to the CdSe/CdTe interface to form long-lived charge transfer excitons (with electrons in the CdSe domain and hole in the CdTe domain). By ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy, we showed that the efficient exciton localization efficiency could be attributed to ultrafast exciton localization (0.64 ± 0.07 ps), which was facilitated by large in-plane exciton mobility in these 2D materials and competed effectively with exiton trapping at the CdSe or CdTe domains. The spatial separation of electrons and holes across the CdSe/CdTe heterojunction effectively suppressed radiative and nonradiative recombination processes, leading to a long-lived charge transfer exciton state with a half-life of ∼ 41.7 ± 2.5 ns, ∼ 30 times longer than core-only CdSe nanosheets.
Ultrathin crystalline nanosheets give an extremely high surface area of a specific crystal facet with unique physical and chemical properties compared with normal three-dimensionally polyhedral nanocrystals (NCs). However, the ultrathin metal nanosheets tend to curl themselves or assemble with each other sheet by sheet, which may reduce the effective surface area and accordingly the catalytic activity to a great extent. Here we report a facile wet-chemical route that allows the fabrication of novel excavated rhombic dodecahedral (ERD) PtCu3 alloy NCs with ultrathin nanosheets of high-energy {110} facets. The surface area was measured to be 77 m(2) g(-1) by CO stripping, although the particle size is about 50 nm. Electrochemical characterizations showed that the ERD PtCu3 NCs exhibit excellent electrocatalytic performance and high antipoisoning activity in comparison with commercial Pt black and PtCu3 alloy NCs with {111} surfaces.
Precise engineering of noble-metal nanocrystals (NCs) is not only an important fundamental research topic, but also has great realistic significance in improving their performances required by the poor reserve and high cost of noble metals. Well-faceted noble-metal NCs with nonconvex polyhedral shapes could be promising candidates to optimize their performance and thus minimize their usage, as they may integrate a well-defined surface structure and a large surface area together, enabling them to have outstanding performance and high efficiency of atomic utilization. Moreover, undesirable aggregation and ripening phenomena could be avoided. This review provides a comprehensive summary of the unique characteristics and corresponding models of well-faceted nonconvex polyhedral noble-metal NCs by classifying the cases into four distinct types, namely the concave polyhedral structure, excavated polyhedral structure, branched structure and nanocage structure, respectively. Due to the complexity of nonconvex morphologies and the thermodynamic antipathy for the growth of nonconvex shaped NCs, we firstly demonstrate the structure characterization and synthetic methodology in detail. Subsequently, typical applications in electrocatalysis and plasmonic fields are presented to demonstrate the unique surface and morphological effects generated from the well-faceted nonconvex NCs. To promote further development in this field, the perspectives and challenges concerning well-faceted noble-metal NCs with nonconvex shapes are put forward in the end.
Suppression of Auger recombination in colloidal quantum dots (QDs) is important for their many applications, ranging from biological tagging, QD lasing, to solar energy conversion. Although it has been reported that the biexciton Auger recombination time of core/shell QDs can be significantly prolonged compared to core-only QDs, a systematic investigation of their dependence on the shell thickness is lacking. In this work, using CdSe@CdS core/shell QDs as a model system, we investigated the shell thickness dependence of biexciton lifetimes in both type I and quasi-type II QDs, prepared using large and small core sizes, respectively. We observe a strong increase of biexciton lifetime with the shell thickness and a larger saturation volume in quasi-type II CdSe@CdS QDs, compared to type I CdSe@CdS QDs. These trends can be attributed to the different thickness dependences of electron–hole wave function overlaps in these materials, which reflect their different extents of conduction band electron delocalization. Our findings provide further insight for rational design of core/shell QDs with suppressed Auger recombination rates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.