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.

Ferroelectric materials are characterized by a spontaneous polarization that can be switched by external electric field. This property is important for various technological applications such ferroelectric random access memories. However, when ferroelectric film thickness is reduced down to a nanoscale the ferroelectric polarization may become unstable due to strong depolarization fields and interface effects.

High conductivity and efficient charge injection into organic layers could lead to the design of more efficient organic solar cells and molecular electronics, especially light emitting diodes. Most organic materials are however insulators and only few exhibit high conducting properties. Nebraska MRSEC researchers in collaboration with their colleagues at University of Puerto Rico have discovered that zwitterion molecules of the p-benzoquinonemonoimine type are different from being a standard insulator.