Photonics Technology Letters IEEE 1998, 10:961–963.CrossRef Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions SYL carried out the electroabsorption design, fabrication, and measurements; participated in the studies of electroabsorption behavior; and drafted the manuscript. SFY conceived of the study and participated in its design and coordination.

ACYN carried out the material studies and participated in the design, studies of the electroabsorption behavior, and manuscript editing. TG participated in the device measurement. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background NVP-BGJ398 price Globally, approximately 600 million tons of rice paddies is produced each year. On an average, 20% of the rice paddy is husk, giving an annual total production of 120 million tons [1]. In Vietnam, the average output of the country is 42 billion tons per year, and this country is the second largest manufacturer of rice in the world. Rice husk (RH) is an agricultural waste material that should be eliminated. The chemical composition of RH is similar to that of many common organic fibers, containing cellulose, lignin,

hemicelluloses, and silica, which is the primary component of ash. After burning, the organic composition is decomposed and rice husk ash (RHA) is obtained [1–3]. RHA is one of the most silica-rich raw materials containing about 90% to 98% silica LY2874455 solubility dmso and some amount of metallic impurities (after complete combustion) among the family of other agro-wastes [4–8]. It is important that the silica in RHA exists in the amorphous state and has high surface area [9–13]. Because of these features, silica has many applications, such as sources for synthetic adsorption materials [14–16], carriers, medical additives, fillers in composite materials, etc. [17, 18],

and demonstrates advantages when achieved at nanometer size. Silica is a polymer of silicic acid consisting of inter-linked SiO4 units in a tetrahedral fashion with the general formula SiO2. In nature, it exists as sand, glass, quartz, etc. Naturally occurring silica is crystalline, whereas synthetically obtained silica is amorphous in nature. Silica used in chemical applications is synthesized from either silicate solution Aurora Kinase or silane reagents [19]. There are various methods to prepare silica selleck screening library nanoparticles. Adam et al. [20] synthesized spherical nanosilica from agricultural biomass as RH via the sol–gel method. The resulting silica particles were shown to be agglomerates with an average dimension of 15 to 91 nm. Jal et al. [21] synthesized nanosilica via the precipitation method, and the resulting nanosilica were found to have a particle size of 50 nm in dimension. However, the sol–gel technique [19, 21–23] is the most common method for silica synthesis. It involves simultaneous hydrolysis and condensation reaction.