The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Alabama investigates new materials that may lead to future information technologies. The Center involves interdisciplinary research by faculty participants from the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, Materials and Metallurgical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. The MRSEC research is organized into two interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs). IRG1, Dynamics and Transport in Nanostructured Magnetic Materials, focuses on the synthesis, characterization, modeling and optimization of films of ordered, self-assembled, monodisperse, magnetic nanoparticles that may serve as future extremely high density magnetic recording media. IRG2, Dendrimer-Based Materials for Information Technology, investigates new dendrimer-based materials for information technology and evolves from a seed project that demonstrated long-term charge storage in special redox gradient dendrimer molecules.
The Center maintains shared experimental facilities in support of its research and for student training. The MRSEC also supports education and outreach efforts that include development of instructional materials for middle school students by teachers and MRSEC faculty, a summer research experience for teachers and undergraduates, and a summer research program for faculty and students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The Center has strong interactions with the magnetic recording industry that inform the fundamental research done by the MRSEC participants of 'real wotld' contraints and needs.
The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder supports innovative research and education in liquid crystals, ranging from cutting-edge, basic liquid crystal and soft materials science to the development of enhanced capabilities for photonic, chemical, and biotech applications of liquid crystals. A multi-disciplinary team of physicists, chemists, biochemists, molecular biologists, chemical engineers and materials scientists work collaboratively on research and education projects. The Center offers a broad program of activities directed towards education and enhancement of science literacy. These include summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates and Research Experiences for Teachers. Its K-12 outreach program, Materials Science from Colorado University, brings Center personnel into classrooms and uses the understanding of materials to teach physical science concepts. Outreach activities to the public include the Liquid Crystal Wizards family science show. The MRSEC will participate in a University-wide program (Red Shirt Program) designed to offer a pre-freshman year of preparatory STEM instruction, communication skills development, and clustered housing to help prepare underserved high school students for success as science and engineering undergraduates. The Center pursues collaborative research with a variety of companies and international collaborators and offers its excellent experimental and computational shared facilities for outside users.
Research at the MRSEC is organized as a single Interdisciplinary Research Group, Liquid Crystal Frontiers, with three research thrusts. The Liquid Crystal Macro/Nano/Molecular thrust focuses on the science and technology of bulk and composite liquid crystal systems, pursuing the design and synthesis of new materials, and the discovery and exploration of novel themes of self assembly and ordering. The Active Liquid Crystal Interfaces thrust pursues the science and applications of soft interface structures, emphasizing those that respond to external stimuli, such as light, fields, or chemical composition, and in doing so affect the surrounding bulk media. The Functional Liquid Crystal Assemblies thrust advances the science and technology of hierarchically-structured soft condensed phases, emphasizing nanophase segregation as a path to novel functional materials.
Biological membranes are exceptional materials that combine seemingly divergent properties. They are mechanically tough and difficult to rupture, yet they are highly fluid and readily change shape. They are permeable to certain molecules while impermeable to others. These unique properties make membranes an indispensable structural component of all living organisms and it has been proposed that life originated from simple protocell vesicles. These attributes also make membranes attractive from a materials perspective, leading to their use in diverse applications including drug delivery and biosensors. A materials scientist and a biological cell face similar challenges when using membranes to build materials or organelles. How can laterally heterogeneous compartmentalized membranes be designed? How can 3D membrane shape be dynamically manipulated? How can transport across membranes be regulated? We will elucidate design principles that govern these structures and processes, to enable engineering membrane-based materials and to illuminate how biological cells use membrane-based structures to achieve specific functions.
The Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) addresses fundamental problems in materials science and engineering that are important to the scientific community, society and the future economic growth of the United States. Current areas of interest include the support of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary materials research and education of the highest quality in the areas of new semiconductors for microelectronics, novel nanostructures for high speed communication devices and advanced polymeric materials. A prime driver behind the research activities of the UCSB MRSEC is to address problems of a scope and complexity requiring the advantages of scale and interdisciplinarity that can only be provided by a campus-based research center. The MRSEC has a leadership role in Educational Outreach programs and in the development of Industrial and International Collaborations on the UCSB campus. It provides undergraduate research opportunities, graduate student training, outreach to K-12 students and teachers, and community outreach. The outstanding Central Facilities program plays a fundamentally important role in the research of all MRSEC programs and additionally has a broad impact on the materials research community at UCSB, local and national companies, and government laboratories.
The MRSEC consists of the following IRGs: IRG-1: Specific, Reversible and Programmable Bonding in Supra- and Macromolecular Materials identifies new experimental and computational methods for precisely controlling the structure and properties of materials based on directed and reversible interactions.. IRG-2: Oxides as Semiconductors focuses on the theory, growth, and application of ultra-pure semiconducting oxides. IRG-3: Soft Cellular Materials seeks to use tailor made/functionalized nanoparticles and block copolymers, in association with polymer blends, to develop new soft materials with precisely controlled cellular structures. IRG-4: Nanostructured Materials by Molecular Beam Epitaxy will examine the development of all-epitaxial metal/semiconductor nanocomposite systems for potential applications in high speed and Terahertz technology.
The Atomic Scale Design, Control, and Characterization of Oxide Structures IRG is based upon novel chemical, electronic, and magneto-electric phenomena that arise at atomically abrupt complex oxide interfaces. Fundamental understanding of these phenomena and their exploitation to create new classes of devices lies at the heart of the intellectual merit. The broader impacts of the research are in discovering and utilizing novel interfacial phenomena to push devices used for communication, computation, and sensing beyond present paradigms. Three grand challenges motivate the research: designing new interfacial systems that impart unique chemical and physical properties; creating new device paradigms based on the novel properties of complex oxide interfaces; and understanding and manipulating strong electronic correlations that are responsible for many of the novel properties of oxide interfaces. The approach of using cross-cutting teams, including teachers, undergraduates, and high school students to carry out the research, broadens the impact to the entire STEM pipeline.
Nucleic acids (NAs) are extraordinary molecules, developed by life to store and transfer genetic information using sequence-directed duplexing. IRG2 is organized to carry out a broad exploration of the sequence-directed self-assembly of functional materials using Click Nucleic Acids (CNAs). CNAs are a new DNA analog system, invented by Center investigators, in which oligomer chains with DNA-style sequences of selected bases are synthesized using thiol-ene click chemistry. The resulting thio-ether backbone/base structure is similar in its essential geometry to that of DNA and other NA analogs such as peptide nucleic acid (PNA), enabling CNA to exhibit sequence-directed duplexing analogous to that of DNA, as predicted by atomistic molecular dynamic simulations and observed experimentally in complexation, gelation and biodetection studies. The synergistic combination of click chemistry and oligo-nucleotide synthesis has dramatic advantages in expanding sequence-directed assembly into the realm of practical materials science and technology. IRG2 research is organized into two major project areas: Design and Synthesis and Self-Assembly.
• Design and Synthesis - This project focuses on the creation and characterization of new CNA molecules. Research activities include developing highly scalable synthetic processes for CNAs, expanding the base alphabets, and controlling the backbone and side chains to tailor molecular functionality and compatibility.
• Self-Assembly - The principal aim of this project is the exploration of CNA sequence-directed self-assembly functionalities in a variety of interfacial and bulk applications, taking advantage of the enhanced programmability and design flexibility afforded by CNAs, in applications including nanotemplating and nanopatterning, nanoparticle organization, block copolymers, and hydrogels.
IRG-1 is investigating materials where spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and electron-electron (Coulomb) correlations are of comparable magnitude, and the subsequent emergence of novel electronic phases in those materials. Using chemistry, structure, epitaxial strain and d-electron count, IRG-1 tunes fundamental interactions in 5d based materials to discover new phases and give insight into their novel properties. Among the remarkable new phases that can arise are axion insulators (predicted to possess unusual magnetoelectric properties) and Weyl semimetals (predicted to have disconnected “Fermi arcs” on the surface of the material). IRG-1 is going beyond the widely studied d5 iridates to explore d-electron counts from d2 to d4.
IRG-1 Faculty
The Center for the Science and Engineering of Materials (CSEM) at Caltech, established in September of 2000, addresses both research and educational aspects of polymeric, structural, photonic, and ferroelectric materials that will be necessary to solve critical societal needs of the twenty-first century. The Center pioneers a number of exotic and futuristic materials and applications such as liquid metals, responsive gels, and tiny medical sensors.
IRG Senior Participants:
Katja Nowack (Phys, co-leader), Dan Ralph (Phys, co-leader), Robert Buhrman (Appl Phys), Craig Fennie (Appl Phys), Greg Fuchs (ApplPhys), Eun-Ah Kim (Phys), Kin Fai Mak (Phys), David Muller (ApplPhys), Farhan Rana (ElecE), Jie Shan (Appl Phys).
Collaborators: Tomas Arias (Cornell), Sol Gruner (Cornell), Darrell Schlom (Cornell). Industrial Collaborators: Qualcomm, Samsung, Western Digital
The goal of our research is to discover, understand, and apply new mechanisms for controlling spins in magnetic devices. This field is important both because it is an area of rapid progress in fundamental materials physics (e.g., Berry phases, topological materials, and other effects of spin-orbit coupling) and because improved spin control can often be applied quickly for technology. We aim to provide the scientific foundations for energy-efficient nonvolatile memories with revolutionary capabilities and also frequency-agile nanoscale microwave oscillators extendable to THz frequencies.
The study and application of LCs stands as a central discipline of soft materials science, providing the conceptual framework for understanding and describing a wide variety of structural and dynamic behavior. IRG1 research is directed toward the creation, understanding, and application of novel soft materials with liquid crystal organization as an underlying theme, and is organized into three major project areas: Molecular/Macroscopic, Functional Liquid Crystal Assemblies, and Active Soft Interfaces.
• Molecular/Macroscopic - This project focuses on the discovery of new LC structural paradigms; understanding the molecular origins of the macroscopic characteristics of LC systems; and the synthesis and physical evaluation of new materials designed to exhibit chosen features of LC molecular organization. Liquid crystalline systems investigated include helical nanofilament phases of bent-core LCs, colloidal LCs of inorganic molecular monolayer sheets, topological colloids, and chromonic LCs.
• Functional Liquid Crystal Assemblies - The ordering and structural features of LC phases can be used to advantage in creating novel assemblies of molecules and other nanoscale objects with specific functionality. Investigations are being carried out on photopolymerized nanoporous room-temperature ionic LCs, active nematics, and nanoDNA LCs.
• Active Soft Interfaces - A principal goal of this project is to develop and explore novel interfaces that can be used to probe interfacial structure and interactions, and be used to detect chemical environment. Research topics include using LC orientation as a sensitive biosensing tool with visual readout for sequence-selective detection of nucleic acids, using azo-SAMs to explore the photofluidization of glasses, and understanding the interplay of bulk and surface LC order.
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