A System-Agnostic, Adaptable and Extensible Animal Support Cradle System for Cardio-Respiratory-Synchronised, and Other, Multi-Modal Imaging of Small Animals.

Standardisation of animal handling procedures for a wide range of preclinical imaging scanners will improve imaging performance and reproducibility of scientific data. Whilst there has been significant effort in defining how well scanners should operate and how in vivo experimentation should be practised, there is little detail on how to achieve optimal scanner performance with best practices in animal welfare. Here, we describe a system-agnostic, adaptable and extensible animal support cradle system for cardio-respiratory-synchronised, and other, multi-modal imaging of small animals. The animal support cradle can be adapted on a per application basis and features integrated tubing for anaesthetic and tracer delivery, an electrically driven rectal temperature maintenance system and respiratory and cardiac monitoring. Through a combination of careful material and device selection, we have described an approach that allows animals to be transferred whilst under general anaesthesia between any of the tomographic scanners we currently or have previously operated. The set-up is minimally invasive, cheap and easy to implement and for multi-modal, multi-vendor imaging of small animals.

Electromagnetically Transparent Graphene Respiratory Sensors for Multimodal Small Animal Imaging.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) imaging with X-rays are crucial diagnostic techniques in medicine, especially in oncology for evaluating the response to treatment. Body movement causes image blurring and synchronized gating to the respiratory and cardiac cycles is required. Degradation of MRI and CT imaging by the presence of metal in electronic respiratory sensors has limited their use, with a preference for pressure balloons for detecting respiration, but these are cumbersome and insensitive. Here, graphene's role is studied as an electromagnetically transparent electrode in a piezoelectric graphene respiratory sensor (GRS) device designed specifically for dual gated MRI and CT imaging of small animals. The GRS is integrated into a 3D-printed cradle with all-carbon-based device life support (heating pad) and monitoring of small animals (electrocardiogram), enabling both heartbeat and respiration detection, significant improvements to throughput and reproducibility, and reduced animal suffering. This shows graphene's potential for a wide range of electromagnetic transparent electronics for medical imaging and diagnostics, beyond conventional metal electrodes.

Direct Laser Patterning and Phase Transformation of 2D PdSe2 Films for On-Demand Device Fabrication.

Heterophase homojunction formation in atomically thin 2D layers is of great importance for next-generation nanoelectronics and optoelectronics applications. Technologically challenging, controllable transformation between the semiconducting and metallic phases of transition metal chalcogenides is of particular importance. Here, we demonstrate that controlled laser irradiation can be used to directly ablate PdSe2 thin films using high power or trigger the local transformation of PdSe2 into a metallic phase PdSe2-x using lower laser power. Such transformations are possible due to the low decomposition temperature of PdSe2 and a variety of stable phases compared to other 2D transition metal dichalcogenides. Scanning transmission electron microscopy is used to reveal the laser-induced Se-deficient phases of PdSe2 material. The process sensitivity to the laser power allows patterning flexibility for resist-free device fabrication. The laser-patterned devices demonstrate that a laser-induced metallic phase PdSe2-x is stable with increased conductivity by a factor of about 20 compared to PdSe2. These findings contribute to the development of nanoscale devices with homojunctions and scalable methods to achieve structural transformations in 2D materials.

Photocurrent Direction Control and Increased Photovoltaic Effects in All-2D Ultrathin Vertical Heterostructures Using Asymmetric h-BN Tunneling Barriers.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are atomically thick and without out-of-plane dangling bonds. As a result, they could break the confinement of lattice matching, and thus can be freely mixed and matched together to construct vertical van der Waals heterostructures. Here, we demonstrated an asymmetrical vertical structure of graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN)/tungsten disulfide (WS2)/graphene using all chemical vapor deposition grown 2D materials. Three building blocks are utilized in this construction: conductive graphene as a good alternative for the metal electrode due to its tunable Fermi level and ultrathin nature, semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) as an ultrathin photoactive material, and insulating h-BNas a tunneling barrier. Such an asymmetrical vertical structure exhibits a much stronger photovoltaic effect than the symmetrical vertical one without h-BN. By changing the sequence of h-BN in the vertical stack, we could even control the electron flow direction. Also, improvement has been further made by increasing the thickness of h-BN. The photovoltaic effect is attributed to different possibilities of excited electrons on TMDs to migrate to top and bottom graphene electrodes, which is caused by potential differences introduced by an insulating h-BN layer. This study shows that h-BN could be effectively used as a tunneling barrier in the asymmetrical vertical heterostructure to improve photovoltaic effect and control the electron flow direction, which is crucial for the design of other 2D vertical heterostructures to meet various needs of electronic and optoelectronic devices.

Inhomogeneous Strain Release during Bending of WS2 on Flexible Substrates.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials hold great promise in flexible electronics, but the weak van der Waals interlayer bonding may pose a problem during bending, where easy interlayer sliding can occur. Furthermore, thin films of rigid materials are often observed to delaminate from soft substrates during straining. Here, we study the influence of substrate strain on some of the heterostructure configurations we expect to find in devices, composed of three common 2D materials: graphene, tungsten disulfide, and boron nitride. We used photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy to measure changes in the heterostructures with strain applied in situ. All heterostructures were fabricated directly on polymer substrates, using materials synthesized by chemical vapor deposition. We observed an inhomogeneous release of strain in all structures, leading to a nonrecoverable broadening of the PL peak and shift of the bandgap. This suggests the need for preconditioning devices before service to ensure stable behavior. A gradual time-dependent relaxation of strain between strain cycles was characterized using time-dependent measurements-an effect which could lead to drift of device behavior during operation. Furthermore, possible degradation was assessed by performing the strain and relax the cycle up to 200 times, where we found little further change after the initial shifts had stabilized. These results have important ramifications for devices fabricated from these and other 2D materials, as they suggest extra processing steps and considerations that must be taken to achieve consistent and stable properties.

Revealing Strain-Induced Effects in Ultrathin Heterostructures at the Nanoscale.

Two-dimensional materials are being increasingly studied, particularly for flexible and wearable technologies because of their inherent thickness and flexibility. Crucially, one aspect where our understanding is still limited is on the effect of mechanical strain, not on individual sheets of materials, but when stacked together as heterostructures in devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of Kelvin probe microscopy in capturing the influence of uniaxial tensile strain on the band-structures of graphene and WS2 (mono- and multilayered) based heterostructures at high resolution. We report a major advance in strain characterization tools through enabling a single-shot capture of strain defined changes in a heterogeneous system at the nanoscale, overcoming the limitations (materials, resolution, and substrate effects) of existing techniques such as optical spectroscopy. Using this technique, we observe that the work-functions of graphene and WS2 increase as a function of strain, which we attribute to the Fermi level lowering from increased p-doping. We also extract the nature of the interfacial heterojunctions and find that they get strongly modulated from strain. We observe that the strain-enhanced charge transfer with the substrate plays a dominant role, causing the heterostructures to behave differently from two-dimensional materials in their isolated forms.

Lateral Graphene-Contacted Vertically Stacked WS2 /MoS2 Hybrid Photodetectors with Large Gain.

A demonstration is presented of how significant improvements in all-2D photodetectors can be achieved by exploiting the type-II band alignment of vertically stacked WS2 /MoS2 semiconducting heterobilayers and finite density of states of graphene electrodes. The photoresponsivity of WS2 /MoS2 heterobilayer devices is increased by more than an order of magnitude compared to homobilayer devices and two orders of magnitude compared to monolayer devices of WS2 and MoS2 , reaching 103 A W-1 under an illumination power density of 1.7 × 102 mW cm-2 . The massive improvement in performance is due to the strong Coulomb interaction between WS2 and MoS2 layers. The efficient charge transfer at the WS2 /MoS2 heterointerface and long trapping time of photogenerated charges contribute to the observed large photoconductive gain of ≈3 × 104 . Laterally spaced graphene electrodes with vertically stacked 2D van der Waals heterostructures are employed for making high-performing ultrathin photodetectors.

Negative Electro-conductance in Suspended 2D WS2 Nanoscale Devices.

We study the in situ electro-conductance in nanoscale electronic devices composed of suspended monolayer WS2 with metal electrodes inside an aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope. Monitoring the conductance changes when the device is exposed to the electron beam of 80 keV energy reveals a reversible decrease in conductivity with increasing beam current density. The response time of the electro-conductance when exposed to the electron beam is substantially faster than the recovery time when the beam is turned off. We propose a charge trap model that accounts for excitation of electrons into the conduction band and localized trap states from energy supplied by inelastic scattering of incident 80 keV electrons. These results show how monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide 2D semiconductors can be used as transparent direct electron detectors in ultrathin nanoscale devices.