We have carried out comparative studies on transparent conductive thin films made with two kinds of commercial carbon nanotubes: HiPCO and arc-discharge nanotubes. These films have been further exploited as hole-injection electrodes for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) on both rigid glass and flexible substrates. Our experiments reveal that films based on arc-discharge nanotubes are overwhelmingly better than HiPCO-nanotube-based films in all of the critical aspects, including surface roughness, sheet resistance, and transparency. Further improvement in arc-discharge nanotube films has been achieved by using PEDOT passivation for better surface smoothness and using SOCl2 doping for lower sheet resistance. The optimized films show a typical sheet resistance of approximately 160 Omega/ square at 87% transparency and have been used successfully to make OLEDs with high stabilities and long lifetimes.

We demonstrate detection of NO2 down to ppb levels using transistors based on both single and multiple In2O3 nanowires operating at room temperature. This represents orders-of-magnitude improvement over previously reported metal oxide film or nanowire/nanobelt sensors. A comparison between the single and multiple nanowire sensors reveals that the latter have numerous advantages in terms of great reliability, high sensitivity, and simplicity in fabrication. Furthermore, selective detection of NO2 can be readily achieved with multiple-nanowire sensors even with other common chemicals such as NH3, O2, CO, and H2 around.

We present an approach to use individual In2O3 nanowire transistors as chemical sensors working at room temperature. Upon exposure to a small amount of NO2 or NH3, the nanowire transistors showed a decrease in conductance up to six or five orders of magnitude and also substantial shifts in the threshold gate voltage. These devices exhibited significantly improved chemical sensing performance compared to existing solid-state sensors in many aspects, such as the sensitivity, the selectivity, the response time, and the lowest detectable concentrations. Furthermore, the recovery time of our devices can be shortened to just 30 s by illuminating the devices with UV light in vacuum.

We thank the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research for support through F49620-00-1-0103 and a MURI from the U.S. Army Research Office through DAAD19-99-1-0316.

High quality MgO/Fe 3 O 4 core−shell nanowires have been successfully synthesized by depositing an epitaxial shell of Fe 3 O 4 onto single crystal MgO nanowires. The material composition and stoichoimetric ratio have been carefully examined and confirmed with a variety of characterization techniques. These novel structures have rendered unique opportunities to investigate the transport behavior and spintronic property of Fe 3 O 4 in its one-dimensional form. Room-temperature magnetoresistance of ∼1.2% was observed in the as-synthesized nanowires under a magnetic field of B ) 1.8 T, which has been attributed to the tunneling of spin-polarized electrons across the anti-phase boundaries.