Femtosecond laser irradiation enables local crystalline nanojoining of silver nanowires with minimizing thermal damage on flexible substrates.

No abstract

This paper reports the thermal conductivity k of matched pair cell lines: two pairs of a normal and a cancer cell, one pair of a primary and metastatic cell. The 3ω method with a nanoscale thermal sensor was used to measure k at the single-cell level. To observe the difference in k between normal and cancer cells, the measurements were conducted for Hs 578Bst/Hs 578 T (human breast cells) and TE 353.Sk/TE 354.T (human skin cells). Then k of WM-115/WM-266-4, a primary and metastatic pair of human skin cell, was measured to find the effect of disease progression on k. The measured k data for normal and disease cell samples show statistically meaningful differences. In all cases, k decreased as the disease progressed. This work shows that thermal-analysis schemes, such as the 3ω method, have a potential to detect diseases at the cell level.

Inter-allotropic structural transformation of sp structured nanocarbon is a topic of fundamental and technological interest in scalable nanomanufacturing. Such modifications usually require extremely high temperature or high-energy irradiation, and are usually a destructive and time-consuming process. Here, we demonstrate a method for engineering a molecular structure of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and their network properties by femtosecond laser irradiation. This method allows effective coalescence between SWNTs, transforming them into other allotropic nanocarbon structures (double-walled, triple-walled and multi-walled nanotubes) with the formation of linear carbon chains. The nanocarbon network created by this laser-induced transformation process shows extraordinarily strong coalescence induced mode in Raman spectra and two-times enhanced electrical conductivity. This work suggests a powerful method for engineering sp carbon allotropes and their junctions, which provides possibilities for next generation materials with structural hybridization at the atomic scale.