Search

Asymmetrical films of adhesive protein Mfp-5 show significantly higher reversible adhesion to smooth mica surfaces than the “gold standard” of noncovalent binding: well-ordered avidin-biotin interactions. The insights are crucial for intelligent translation of mussel adhesion to engineered systems.

In solids, the kinetic energy of an electron generally increases as the square of its momentum. By contrast, in a Topological Insulator such as Bi2Te2Se, electrons on the surface are predicted to be Dirac Fermions for which the energy increases linearly with momentum. In a magnetic field B, the allowed states of an electron are quantized into Landau Levels (LLs). The sequential emptying of occupied LLs in an increasing field leads to quantum

IRG-D researchers at Princeton University have combined superconducting qubit technology with single spin devices, demonstrating that the microwave field of a superconducting resonator is sensitive to the spin of a single electron. The device may allow two spatially separated electron spins to be coupled, resulting in quantum entanglement.  

MSFCU has been extraordinarily successful in reaching Colorado K-12 students with physical sciences presentations tuned for the Colorado curriculum. To date nearly 2000 classes have served over 78,000 

Creating well-organized conducting nanostructures in a flexible polymer matrix provides platforms for numerous applications in optics, sensors, and wave-guiding structures.  Working in the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Polymers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Thayumanavan and Russell achieved self-assembled hybrid structures from diblock copolymers and gold nanoparticles, where the

 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.