NP [SGG]

Flexible and light-weight energy storage device is required for soft electronics. Novel flexible solid-state pseudo-parallel pseudocapacitor (SPP) with three electrodes is firstly proposed to achieve light-weight and excellent energy storage ability. SPP is assembled using only three electrodes without outer circuit. Active material of delta-MnO2 is fabricated on carbon cloth (CC) using electrodeposition with different currents. Highest specific capacitance of 9.41 F/cm(2) is obtained for MnO2 /CC electrode prepared using 30 mA, due to high surface area, large pore volume and suitable pore structure of nanosheet array. Normal-type pseudocapacitor (NP), two normal-type pseudocapacitor connected in parallel (NP in parallel), and two types of SPP are assembled using optimized MnO2/CC positive electrode and activated carbon negative electrode. The SPP composed of two positive electrodes and one negative electrode (PNP) shows best energy storage ability with energy density of 97.09 Wh/kg at power density of 0.65 W/kg, owing to more MnO2 pseudocapacitor electrode and better device configuration. However, worse charge/discharge stability is observed for PNP owing to lacking sufficient carbon material for providing stable electric double layer capacitor energy storage mechanism. This work greatly opens new blueprint for designing device configurations to achieve light-weight and efficient energy storage ability for flexible solid-state pseudocapacitors. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The presence of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in a patient's bloodstream is a hallmark of metastatic cancer. The detection and analysis of CTCs is a promising diagnostic and prognostic strategy as they may carry useful genetic information from their derived primary tumor, and the enumeration of CTCs in the bloodstream has been known to scale with disease progression. However, the detection of CTCs is a highly challenging task owing to their sparse numbers in a background of billions of background blood cells. To effectively utilize CTCs, there is a need for an assay that can detect CTCs with high specificity and can locally enrich CTCs from a liquid biopsy. We demonstrate a versatile methodology that addresses these needs by utilizing a combination of nanoparticles. Enrichment is achieved using targeted magnetic nanoparticles and high specificity detection is achieved using a ratiometric detection approach utilizing multiplexed targeted and non-targeted surface-enhanced Raman Scattering Nanoparticles (SERS-NPs). We demonstrate this approach with model prostate and cervical circulating tumor cells and show the ex vivo utility of our methodology for the detection of PSMA or folate receptor over-expressing CTCs. Our approach allows for the mitigation of interference caused by the non-specific uptake of nanoparticles by other cells present in the bloodstream and our results from magnetically trapped CTCs reveal over a 2000% increase in targeted SERS-NP signal over non-specifically bound SERS-NPs. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement