For hardness and stiffness, it's long been thought that nothing beats diamond. But Roderic Lakes and Don Stone, from the University of Wisconsin MRSEC and their colleagues have made a material that is almost ten times stiffer, by embedding small particles of barium titanate in a matrix of tin.

Novel electronic applications often result from fresh theoretical insights into long-familiar materials. Recently, strong interest has focused on the “topological insulators”, notably Bi2Se3and Bi2Te3. In these solids, the electrons on the surface display highly unusual properties. For example, they travel like massless particles (photons and neutrinos), and are much less susceptible to scattering by lattice imperfections. To date, much of the information on topological insulators has come from photoemission experiments and scanning tunneling microscopy.

"Perfectly hydrophobic" surfaces have been developed by McCarthy and are being applied to low friction motion and lubrication McCarthy and Crosby. Shown in the image is an "18-wheel vehicle", prepared by treating a dimethyldichlorosilane-treated quartz plate with UV/ozone through a mask containing 18 hexagonally arrayed 1 mm diameter holes spaced by 4 mm on center.

Normally, well, flaws are bad. But through a newly developed technique of microcontact insertion printing, Penn State researchers can use the flaws in a selfassembled monolayer to place individual isolated molecules in predetermined patterns on a gold substrate. A self-assembled monolayer is a tightly packed wellordered array of molecules covering a surface, all tilted to one side like a cornfield in a windstorm.

The vortex state of a magnetic nanoring has special attributes of no magnetic poles nor stray fields. The circulatory magnetization can have two chiralities:, left-handed or right-handed, for storing "0" and "1", as shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1: Two chiralities of a magnetic nanorings for storing "1" and "0".

Molecules come in well-defined lengths: Penn State MRSEC researchers have invented a technique called "Molecular Rulers," in which molecular layers of precisely defined widths coat preexisting structures and form templates for patterning new structures with ever-smaller dimensions. Advanced lift-off processing and new bilayer resists, developed in 2005, have dramatically improved the uniformity and sharpness of the nanometer-scale gaps between the parent and daughter structures. These gaps can be tailored with molecular scale precision.