Michael M. Baksh, Esther M. Winter, Nathan G. Clack and Jay T. Groves: University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Jia Sun, Brad Payne, Greg Szulczewski, and Silas Blackstock (February, 2006)

When conjugated polymer crystals nucleate off of the gate dielectric, the conjugated backbones, shown in red, are all aligned. Charge can easily hop from one grain to another. Proven strategies for nucleating crystals on the dielectric * Make the dielectric smooth * Coat the dielectric with OTS * Use high boiling point solvent or anneal the film * Use high molecular weight polymers.

Bohdana Discher

Working collaboratively, research groups at the Chicago MRSEC have developed new label-free analytical systems that utilize ultra-small sample sizes of cellular lysate, yet allow these single samples to be assayed for multiple kinase activities. The systems involve the integration of solid-phase biochip peptide arrays, mass spectrometric detection, and microfluidic networks.

When a marble or ball-bearing is dropped onto a bed of fine, loose sand, one first observes a broad splash of sand at impact. Then, a tall jet of granular material shoots up vertically. Experiments at the Chicago MRSEC in collaboration with researchers from the APS at Argonne have tracked the birth and evolution of these granular jets using the fastest x-ray based imaging performed to date (6000 video frames per second)[1].

A team of Princeton researchers has developed an enabling technique for manufacturing electro-optical devices from organic semiconductors. The method relies on a modeling framework to describe different material transfer modes that occur when the organic materials are "stamped" onto an already patterned substrate, which allowed the Princeton team to cleanly transfer an organic thin film from a stamp to a patterned substrate without leaving any voids.

Princeton scientists have developed a new method for making gratings by prying apart two rigid plates that sandwich a thin, glassy polymeric film. The process fractures the film into complementary sets of ridges on each plate, with highly uniform ridge spacings ranging from 200 nm to 200 Â’µm, scaling directly with the film thickness.

A soft cantilever beam, which can detect a very weak force, has been used by IRG1 researchers to uncover a striking property of cuprate superconductors: that trace supercurrents surrounding magnetic flux vortices persist for tens of degrees above the superconducting transition temperature Tc. The field needed to unbind these paired electrons is 60-100 times stronger than that inside a clinical MRI machine.