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UCI MRSEC researchers have performed the first in-depth time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy study on molecular active materials formed under dissipative self-assembly conditions and compared the results to the same molecular formed under thermodynamic control. They found that the dissipative self-assembly conditions can stabilize the formation on transient, thermodynamically unstable phases and that these phases can be highly ordered.

Many species of birds have feathers with colors that are the result of light scattering from a disordered arrangement of nanoscale air spheres. The feathers appear to be the same color from every angle. Inspired by these beautiful feathers, we design structures of polymer nanoparticles that produce color the same way. This is a new way to make color from nanostructures and could be useful for textiles, coatings, and cosmetics.

Nearly 500 K-12 students from NYC schools visited NYU MRSEC laboratories for science demonstrations as part of the MRSEC Scientific Frontiers Program Developed class modules for 70 9th graders in the Urban Assembly Institute for Math and Science for Young Women, an all-girls school in Brooklyn for the underrepresented and underprivileged Science demonstrations, in Spanish, for more than 80 students at Don Pedro Albizu Campos elementary school, which primarily serves economically disadvantaged Hispanic student

Ordered double perovskites, such as Sr2FeMoO6, are among the very few materials that allow electrons of one spin direction to move through them as though they were passing through a normal metal, while blocking electrons of the opposite spin.  Materials that behave this way at room temperature are even more exotic.

Widely used in small electronic devices and in the nascent market for HEVS (Hybrid Electric Vehicles), lithium ion batteries store more energy for theirweight, operate at a higher voltage, and hold a charge much longer thanother rechargeable batteries. As a new approach, Belcher and Ceder of the MIT MRSEC IRG-I have explored a biological way to create new charge storage materials for lithium ion batteries by using a virus as a scaffold totemplate the growth and assembly of nanoscale electrode

Topological insulators are a new class of insulators in which a bulk gap for electronic excitations is generated by strong spin-orbit coupling.

Two self-assembled colloidal clusters, as seen under the optical microscope. The cluster on the left, a tri-tetrahedron, and the cluster on the right, an octahedron, have the same energy. But in an experiment where both clusters are allowed to form randomly in solution, the less symmetric tri-tetrahedron occurs more than twenty times as often as the highly symmetric octahedron because of the many more ways to form the tri-tetrahedron.