Highlights

Single-crystal organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) are ideal device structures for studying fundamental science associated with charge transport in organic materials and have demonstrated outstanding electrical characteristics. However, it remains a technical challenge to integrate single-crystal devices into practical electronic applications. A key difficulty is that organic single-crystal devices are usually fabricated one device at a […]

Objective: To develop novel microfluidic flow cells that allow trapping of single DNA molecules and studies of the binding of sequence-specific probes to the trapped DNA.

Approach: Two different devices have been designed and fabricated: a cross-slot that uses flow focusing to direct probes to the trapped DNA and a microfluidic “four roll mill” that allows the flow type to be varied from extension to shear to rotation near the trapped DNA (fig. 2).

The Rubner and Van Vliet groups of the MIT MRSEC have discovered a previously overlooked factor that should be considered in the design of anti-bacterial coatings…

The quest for economical devices with faster speeds, lighter weights, and higher feature density drives demand for new fabrication tools that create ever more complex patterns, with sub-micron features. Typical state-of-the-art fabrication is top-down and involves multiple steps and careful surface preparation; Nature, on the other hand, provides us with examples of delicate, detailed, […]

Materials with a negative refractive index can form super-resolution planar lenses,
sub-surface cameras or compact resonators which are otherwise impossible to realize. MRSEC researchers have predicted for the first time a tunable negative-index material with
low loss, using liquid crystals, whose operating wavelength can be changed by controlling the liquid crystal orientation.
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Bimetallic gold/platinum nanorod motors spontaneously move towards hydrogen peroxide fuel when they are placed in a fuel gradient, the first time this behavior has been seen outside of the biological world.
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Semiconductors with narrow energy gaps have electronic properties, including a high mobility and strong spin-orbit coupling, that are advantageous for electronic device applications. The switching speed of a field-effect transistor and the sensitivity of a geometrical magnetoresistor are improved by a high carrier mobility. In addition to these traditional devices, we are studying devices […]

Understanding the locations of atoms as they are deposited on a surface is critical for growing interfaces of electronic device quality.