Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have been fabricated from organic semiconducting polymer nanospheres (SPNs) which have been deposited from aqueous dispersions. The active layer of the devices consists of a single, homogeneous layer of light emitting SPNs, as verified by optical, interferometric and surface probe measurements. Different batches of SPNs with different SPN diameters have been tested (69nm, 95nm, 126nm and 150 nm). All SPN-based OLEDs exhibit a light emission onset corresponding to the SPN energy gap (ca. 2.7 eV for m-LPPP, a semiconducting para-phenylene ladder polymer). The low onset is attributed to field enhanced injection of charge carriers at the aluminum cathode due to the formation of stalactite-type nanostructures. A detailed comparison of the SPN-based and bulk semiconducting polymer films reveals no differences in the basic optoelectronic properties.

The combination of atomic-resolution Z-contrast microscopy, electron energy loss spectroscopy and first-principles theory has proved to be a powerful means for structure property correlations at interfaces and nanostructures. The scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) now routinely provides atomic-sized electron beams, allowing simultaneous Z-contrast imaging and EELS as shown in Fig. 1. The feasiblity of correcting the inherently large spherical aberration of microscope objective lenses promises to at least double the achievable resolution. The potential benefits for the STEM, however, may turn out to be much greater than those for the conventional TEM because it is very much less sensitive to chromatic instabilities. The 100 kV VG Microscopes HB501UX at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is now fitted with an aberration corrector constructed by Nion Co., which improved its resolution from 2.2 Å (full-width-half-maximum probe intensity) to around 1.3 Å. It is now very comparable in performance to the uncorrected 300 kV HB603U STEM at ORNL which, before correction, also had a directly interpretable resolution of 1.3 Å, although information transfer had been demonstrated down to 0.78 Å8. Initial results after installing an aberration corrector on the 300 kV STEM indicate a resolution of 0.84 Å. The theoretically achievable probe size in the absence of instabilities is predicted to be 0.5 Å.

For measuring molecular device, we developed a dual-probe scanning tunneling microscope (D-STM) composed of two STM systems in which a carbon nanotube (NT) was used for STM tip. Using D-STM, we fabricated a NT ring device. The NT ring device showed a switching behavior with applying gate bias. Furthermore, in STM imaging for various gate biases, we could observe directly hole injection into the NT ring.