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Kagan and Murray fabricated the first electronic circuits from nanometer scale semiconductor particles known as quantum dots. These quantum dots are synthesized in solution and tailored in the shape of cubes so when they are assembled into solids, they fill space. The nanoscale cubes allow for high performance thin film electronics. The chemistry developed further allowed these circuits to be realized on plastics for flexible electronic applications.

Center researchers are collaborating with spin-off Displaytech to develop FLC materials for application in picoprojectors. The high quality time sequential color and high brightness enabled by FLC switching speed makes FLC-on-silicon an excellent display technology for picoprojectors, currently being marketed by 3M.

LCMRC researchers have created a new family of electrolytes that promise to revolutionalize Lithium ion battery technology. Electrolytes are the electrically conducting media in batteries. Good ones carry high current density without chemical degradation and maintain their desirable characteristics over many charging and discharging cycles.

When an object, such as a colloidal particle, is put into a liquid crystal, it alters the otherwise uniform orientation of the molecules, creating a field of orientational disturbance around itself. This field acts on the object to align it with particular orientation relative to the average liquid crystal direction, indicated by the arrows in the image.

As part of a series of studies on the green chemistry of poly(l-lactides), we have performed a theoretical study of the mechanism of ring-opening polymerization.

One factor limiting the scaling and reproducibility of device elements in computer processors is the random distribution of dopants in semiconductor nanostructures. To overcome this obstacle for faster computing, new ways to position and address individual dopants are needed. Proposals for next-generation computing based on quantum variables such as electron spin also require the ability to address and control interactions between individual atoms.