The reliability and sensitivity of a strain gauge made from a nanoparticle monolayer intrinsically depend on electron tunneling between the adjacent nanoparticles, so that creating nanoscale interstitials with uniform...The reliability and sensitivity of a strain gauge made from a nanoparticle monolayer intrinsically depend on electron tunneling between the adjacent nanoparticles, so that creating nanoscale interstitials with uniform distribution and tuning the interparticle separation reversibly during cyclic mechanical stress are two vital issues for performance enhancement. In this work, one assembly technique is initialized to fabricate parallel nanoparticle strips by precisely tailoring the contact angle of a gold colloid on a substrate. The assembly of a nanoparticle monolayer with a close-packed pattern can be simultaneously switched on and off by independently varying the contact angle across a threshold value of 4.2~. This nanoparticle strip shows a reversible and reliable electrical response even if a mechanical strain as small as 0.027% is periodically supplied, implying well-controlled electron tunneling between the adjacent nanoparticles.展开更多
基金Acknowledgements This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation of Hubei Province （Grant No.2011CDB295）, Innovation Funding of HUST （No. 2012TS031）, Spedalized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education （No. 20130142120089）, and the National Science Foundation of China （No. 51371084）. We acknowledge the assistance from the staff in the Analytic and Testing Center of HUST.
文摘The reliability and sensitivity of a strain gauge made from a nanoparticle monolayer intrinsically depend on electron tunneling between the adjacent nanoparticles, so that creating nanoscale interstitials with uniform distribution and tuning the interparticle separation reversibly during cyclic mechanical stress are two vital issues for performance enhancement. In this work, one assembly technique is initialized to fabricate parallel nanoparticle strips by precisely tailoring the contact angle of a gold colloid on a substrate. The assembly of a nanoparticle monolayer with a close-packed pattern can be simultaneously switched on and off by independently varying the contact angle across a threshold value of 4.2~. This nanoparticle strip shows a reversible and reliable electrical response even if a mechanical strain as small as 0.027% is periodically supplied, implying well-controlled electron tunneling between the adjacent nanoparticles.
