The Kirkendall effect has been widely applied for fabrication of nanoscale hollow structures, which involves an unbalanced counterdiffusion through a reaction interface. Conventional treatment of this process only considers the bulk diffusion of growth species and vacancies. In this letter, a conceptual extension is proposed: the development of the hollow interior undergoes two main stages. The initial stage is the generation of small Kirkendall voids intersecting the compound interface via a bulk diffusion process; the second stage is dominated by surface diffusion of the core material (viz., the fast-diffusing species) along the pore surface. This concept applies to spherical as well as cylindrical nanometer and microscale structures, and even to macroscopic bilayers. As supporting evidence, we show the results of a spinel-forming solid-state reaction of core-shell nanowires, as well as of a planar bilayer of ZnO-Al2O3 to illustrate the influence of surface diffusion on the morphology evolution.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nl070026p | DOI Listing |
Sci Adv
January 2025
Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Okazaki, Japan.
Life on the nanoscale has been made accessible in recent decades by the development of fast and noninvasive techniques. High-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) is one such technique that shed light on single protein dynamics. Extending HS-AFM to effortlessly incorporate mechanical property mapping while maintaining fast imaging speed allows a look deeper than topography and reveal details of nanoscale mechanisms that govern life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFACS Appl Mater Interfaces
January 2025
National Base for International Science & Technology Cooperation, National Local Joint Engineering Laboratory for Key materials of New Energy Storage Battery, Hunan Province Key Laboratory of Electrochemical Energy Storage and Conversion, School of Chemistry, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China.
P2-type NaMnNiO as the cathode for sodium-ion batteries, has a relatively high theoretical specific capacity, but its unstable crystal structure and undesirable phase transitions lead to rapid capacity decay. In this work, Mg-B-O coated NaMnNiO microspheres have been synthesized via a liquid-phase method based on solvothermal synthesized NaMnNiO. The Mg-B-O coating layer significantly improves the electrochemical performance, including specific capacity, rate capability, and cycle stability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Sci Technol
January 2025
College of Marine and Environmental Science, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 300457, China.
Humic acid (HA) enhances colloidal transport in porous media, yet the mechanisms by which the HA adsorption conformation affects colloid transport remain unclear. This study investigated the influence of HA on the transport of petroleum-hydrocarbon-contaminated soil colloids (TPHs-SC) in saturated sand columns. The presence of TPHs on the colloidal surface occupied adsorption sites, hindering HA from forming a horizontal adsorption conformation, as observed on uncontaminated soil colloids (SC).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Chem Soc
January 2025
State Key Laboratory of Photocatalysis on Energy and Environment, College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China.
Oxygen vacancies (OVs) spatially confined on the surface of metal oxide semiconductors are advantageous for photocatalysis, in particular, for O-involved redox reactions. However, the thermal annealing process used to generate surface OVs often results in undesired bulk OVs within the metal oxides. Herein, a high pressure-assisted thermal annealing strategy has been developed for selectively confining desirable amounts of OVs on the surface of metal oxides, such as tungsten oxide (WO).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiophys J
January 2025
Department of Pharmacology, School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, CA 92093, USA; Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California San Diego, CA 92093, USA. Electronic address:
Synaptic morphology plays a critical role in modulating the dynamics of neurotransmitter diffusion and receptor activation in interneuron communication. Central physical aspects of synaptic geometry, such as the curvature of the synaptic cleft, the distance between the presynaptic and postsynaptic membranes, and the surface area-to-volume ratio of the cleft, crucially influence glutamate diffusion and N-Methyl-D-Aspartate receptor (NMDAR) opening probabilities. In this study, we developed a stochastic model for receptor activation using realistic synaptic geometries.
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