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The 2023 Holiday Science Lecture “A World of Patterns” was held at Princeton University on December 9, 2023 with over 400 people attending two lectures at McDonnell Hall. Howard Stone and other PCCM researchers (including graduate student and postdoctoral presenters) illustrated ideas of shape, symmetry, packing and pattern formation. Some of the experiments and interactive demonstrations included:

The Imaging and Analysis Center (IAC) supported by PCCM is a world-leading facility for materials characterization. Its central mission is the education, research, and training of students at Princeton University and beyond. The IAC also collaborates with researchers in industry and other academic institutes.

We utilized microfluidic methods to investigate the role of geometric structures, e.g. thin spherical block copolymer shells, in the microphase separation in block copolymer thin films. The shells are comprised of the triblock copolymer styrene-isoprene-styrene (SIS). For air-in-oil-in-water emulsions, microfluidic devices with two consecutive flow-focusing junctions were used to generate air bubble-containing droplets of a solution of the SIS triblock

Chiral superconductivity — a long-sought quantum phase with potential applications in quantum technologies — has eluded definitive microscopic confirmation for decades. While several candidate materials exhibit signatures of time-reversal symmetry breaking, such evidence alone does not prove chiral Cooper pairing.

The Imaging and Analysis Center (IAC), supported by PCCM, is a world-leading facility for materials characterization. Its central mission is the education, research, and training of students at Princeton University and beyond. The IAC also collaborates with researchers in industry and other academic institutes.

Materials with a negative refractive index can form super-resolution planar lenses, sub-surface cameras or compact resonators which are otherwise impossible to realize. MRSEC researchers have predicted for the first time a tunable negative-index material with low loss, using liquid crystals, whose operating wavelength can be changed by controlling the liquid crystal orientation. Download

At the University of Chicago MRSEC, we pursued new outreach directions with campus museums including the Smart Museum of Art and the Oriental Institute.

Northwestern University MRSEC IRG-2 has realized ultra-high-density and mechanically flexible vertical organic electrochemical transistor (vOECT) arrays and complementary circuits through  electron-beam patterning of the conjugated organic semiconductors by electron-beam exposure. The high energy electron-beam disrupts the conjugation in the exposed organic semiconductor area, creating an electronic insulator while retaining ionic conductivity and topological continuity with the redox-active unexposed areas.

A critical element of Northwestern University MRSEC IRG-1 is interfacing cell-free systems with abiotic materials in a way that supports cell-free reaction efficiency and kinetics. In this work, the capacity of bilayer-based compartments (e.g., liposomes, polymersomes) is being assessed to support encapsulated cell-free reactions upon their inclusion in a larger hydrogel matrix.