Program Highlights

May 16, 2012

Responsive Wrinkles

Research
University of Massachusetts Amherst
May 16, 2012

Multiblock Polymers: Panacea or Pandora’s Box

Research
University of Minnesota
Multiblock Polymers: Panacea or Pandora’s Box

This review article examines how careful selection of block number and sequence can yield new structures in a systematic way, and identifies new theoretical approaches for exploring the most promising candidates. Such materials could have impact across a plethora of technologies, ranging from portable energy storage to biomedicine.

May 14, 2012

Giant spin-Seebeck effect could provide power from waste heat

Research
Ohio State University

A team of researchers at The Ohio State University’s Center for Emergent Materials has been studying the interaction between heat and magnetic materials.One such effect, called the spin-Seebeck effect, allows for heat to move magnetic information.

May 14, 2012

Strain tunable room temperature magnetism

Research
Ohio State University
Using a novel deposition technique, IRG-2 researchers have grown fully-ordered Sr2CrReO6 films which are semiconducting and highly magnetic at room temperature. When grown on different substrates dramatic changes in magnetization and resistivity occur.
May 10, 2012

Conjugated Polymer Helices

Research
University of Massachusetts Amherst

 

Polymers having “conjugated structures”, allowing them to conduct electricity, hold great potential for flexible and ink-jet printable electronic devices and inexpensive plastic solar cells. Work by Hayward and Emrick in the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Polymers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown how to coax such polymers to twist into conducting wires thousands of times smaller than the twisted cables used in common electronic devices.

May 8, 2012

Creating a “repair-and-go” system using nanoparticle microencapsulation

Research
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Facile methods for detecting and repairing damaged regions of materials are critically important in numerous structural and functional materials, from airplane wings to fabrics to microelectronics to biological implant materials.  Emrick, Crosby, and Russell, working in the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Polymers at UMass Amherst, demonstrated that microcapsules can carry nanoparticles across a damaged substrate, sense the damaged regions, and deposit nanoparticles selectively into the damaged areas, leaving the rest of the surface unaffected.

May 7, 2012

A Better Type of Computer Memory Demonstrated

Research
Cornell University

Newly discovered “giant” spin Hall effect enables simple and efficient magnetic memory

Most computer memory (so-called random-access memory or RAM) is volatile — the computer forgets the information when power is removed. The technology for making non-volatile magnetic memory is undergoing rapid progress, ...

May 7, 2012

Visualizing the intricate electron pairing in iron-based superconductors

Research
Cornell University

Correlated motion provides new clues to the magnetic origin of high-temperature superconductivity

Superconducting wires conduct electricity perfectly — without any energy losses — because each electron spontaneously bonds to a partner electron. The pairs then perform an intricate dance down the wire, ...

May 3, 2012

FRG-2 – Using Weakly Spin-Coupled Polaron Pair States for a Calibration Free Absolute Magnetometry

University of Utah
Objective: A precise absolute magnetometer based on organic spintronics that is scalable to micron dimensions, has low cost and that is not adversely affected by environmental influences (temperature, air etc.).
May 3, 2012

Liquid Metal-Based Plasmonics

University of Utah
Objective: To develop and characterize new plasmonic metamaterials in the terahertz (THz) spectral range.