Highlights

BASF, a major international chemical company headquartered in Germany, has established a major research initiative at Harvard, the BASF Advanced Research Initiative, that will provide up to $4M/yr in research support.

The annual 3-day program is held in late January to showcase the materials research capabilities of UCSB. The MROP has evolved from a polymer-focused program to a broad materials-themed event over the past 6 years, and features a combination of “latest and greatest” research presentations by UCSB senior students, post-docs, and faculty as well as […]

In a collaboration with an industrial manufacturer of aerosol jet printers (Optomec, Inc.), Lodge, Frisbie, and their students have demonstrated successful low voltage operation of an array of ion-gel gated OFETs printed on flexible polyimide substrates. Every component of the OFETs was printed—the metal electrodes (gold colloidal ink), the semiconductor (poly(3-hexylthiophene), and the gate insulator (the new ion gel material).

Electronic transport through a junction formed between silicon (Si), a monolayer of alkyl chains (C₁₄H₂₉) self-assembled on Si, and a metal (M) is dominated by thermionic emission above the semiconductor barrier and tunneling through the insulating molecular layer [1]. This team of PCCM and Weizmann investigators recently showed [2] that exposing the alkyl monolayers to electron irradiation induces new states between the occupied and unoccupied states of the pristine alkyl chain, evidently through the creation of C=C double bonds and C-C crosslinks since the overall layer density is unaffected.

The continual decrease in microelectronic device feature size, captured in the famous “Moore’s Law”, has come in part from a decrease in the wavelength of light used in the photolithographic steps used to pattern these features. Today, the most advanced production photolithography uses 193 nm ultraviolet (UV) light from an ArF excimer laser. At such […]

Fundamental MRSEC research often leads to new technologies that in turn create innovative start-up companies. QD Vision and Luminus Devices are two exciting examples of this process. In both cases, MRSEC-supported research at MIT helped to develop the basic platform for these new technologies.

In collaboration with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies ferromagnetic bilayers are studied where field-induced tailoring of the exchange bias is achieved. Here, set fields imprint spin states which evolve when consecutively cycled hysteresis loops are measured. Understanding this aging or training effect impacts potential applications based on exchange bias.