Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake. In work reported in Science (May 17, 2013), Aizenberg, Mahadevan, and coworkers exploited nature’s sculpting methods to create visually stunning 3-D structures that may change the way nano- and micro-materials are made.

Studying the electronic properties of the surface states on Topological Insulators requires high quality bulk crystals. We have figured out the defect chemistry of these compounds and grown crystals by the Bridgman Stockbarger method.

Thin block copolymer films are highly relevant for many scientific and industrial applications due to their ability to form uniform domains of controllable shape at nanometer length scales. From a technological point of view, the cases of shapes with long axes may be of interest in the fabrication of nanowires, while upright cylinders and spheres could have potential applications in the patterning of hexagonal arrays for data storage.

Block copolymer thin films are effective templates for fabricating large arrays of nanoscopic objects; for example, polymers which self-assemble into cylinders lying in the plane of the film yield striped patterns, which can be replicated in metal to yield nanowire grids which effectively polarize the short-wavelength ultraviolet light used in today’s advanced production photolithography.   But other applications demand more perfect order of the striped-pattern template:  perfectly straight and unbroken wires. 

Solid-state devices rely on the control of the flow of electrons and holes at the interface (“heterojunction”) formed between different semiconductors. Silicon is the workhorse of the semiconductor industry. However, until now, creating a heterojunction between Si and other materials with a larger energy gap has been an intractable problem for the most part, because of the lack of a lattice match between Si and crystalline wide-gap materials. In this seed, Sturm, Kahn,  Schwartz and Loo report two materials that do

The kagome lattice is an outstanding example of a frustrated magnet, a system in which the magnetic moments cannot satisfactorily align to minimize the energy. Its ground-state configuration has been a long-standing puzzle. Recent debate has focused on the relative stability of a valence bond-crystal, and an isotropic spin-liquid (where quantum fluctuations cause all ordering to disappear). Using numerical techniques, we have shown [1] that there is an intermediate competing

Biofilms are soft, largely organic, highly heterogeneous, self-generated, self-repairing thin films comprised of macromolecules, inorganic ions, and living matter. These films corrode petroleum pipelines and storage tanks, increase drag on shipping vessels, and account for the majority of hospital-treated infections. The mapping between microbial physiology and the material properties of biofilms is complex, of considerable economic importance, and largely uncharted. To date, physiology-biofilm

The electronic properties of the polar interfaces between insulating oxides has been intensely investigated in recent years. An exciting new development is the observation of robust magnetism at the interface of two non-magnetic materials, LaAlO3 (LAO) and SrTiO3 (STO).

During the summer of 2012, Hitachi Inc. loaned the UW-MRSEC education group a table-top scanning electron microscope for use during education and outreach activities. Thirteen fifth-graders synthesized ZnO nanoparticles then used the SEM to examine their particles. The education group sent a summary of the activity including photographs which Hitachi used for an article about the SEM which they published in the Japanese version of the Wall Street Journal.