Highlights

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.
Download

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.
Download

Motor proteins deliver intracellular cargo to specific locations inside cells. These so-called kinesin motors take 8 nm steps along intracellular highways 25 nm wide called microtubules. This transport machinery can be reassembled outside the cell and used to transport nanoscale cargo for separations, sensors, assembly, and other bio-mechanical devices. However, to fully harness these biological […]

Scaling functional machines down to the molecular scale is a key challenge in nanoscale science and technology. However, coaxing individual molecules into performing well-defined mechanical tasks requires radically different strategies than those used to build familiar macroscopic machines like electrical motors. Toward this end, a team of MRSEC scientists have collaborated with synthetic chemists and […]

Normally, well, flaws are bad. But through a newly developed technique of microcontact insertion printing, Penn State researchers can use the flaws in a selfassembled monolayer to place individual isolated molecules in predetermined patterns on a gold substrate. A self-assembled monolayer is a tightly packed wellordered array of molecules covering a surface, all tilted to […]

In eukaryotic cells, kinesin motor proteins transport intracellular cargo along microtubules, 25 nm protein filaments that form the cell cytoskeleton. This biomotor transport system is of fundamental importance in cell function and dysfunction, and provides a model system for nano- and microscale transport in engineered systems. MRSEC researchers Huang, Uppalapati, Hancock, and Jackson are developing […]

In 2004, a Penn State MRSEC team showed that bimetallic platinum/gold nanorods could swim at speeds up to 20 microns per second by catalyzing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Nickel stripes added to the motors allowed them to be steered using weak magnetic fields as a “remote control”. Microgears formed from platinum and gold rotated […]

Frustration is not only a state of mind, but also a state of matter wherein the interactions among different subunits cannot all be satisfied. Ordinary water ice is highly frustrated: there are many many different ways in which the protons within the lattice of ice can be arranged, and all are equally good (or bad, […]