Highlights

Molecules come in well-defined lengths: Penn State MRSEC researchers have invented a technique called “Molecular Rulers,” in which molecular layers of precisely defined widths coat preexisting structures and form templates for patterning new structures with ever-smaller dimensions. Advanced lift-off processing and new bilayer resists, developed in 2005, have dramatically improved the uniformity and sharpness of […]

Penn State researchers John Badding, Venkat Gopalan and Vincent Crespi, working in close collaboration with Pier Sazio at the University of Southhampton, have succeeded in a task that at first sight may seem impossible: depositing uniform, dense conformal semiconducting nanowires deep within the pores of microstructured optical fibers. The resulting silicon and germaniumnanowires […]

In MRSEC-sponsored research, Kevin Kelly, Andrew Osgood, Yasuhiro Shirai, James Tour and Yuming Zhao at Rice university have produced a nanometer-scale car with fullerene wheels that rotate about axles and guide the motion of the nanocar across a substrate. The nanocar, synthesized in Tour’s group, is composed of a single organic molecule with four C60 […]

Penn State researchers have designed a new patterning strategy, microdisplacement printing, which can stamp complex chemical patterns onto a substrate without mixing between the different “inks.” A self assembled monolayer is a single layer of highly ordered, closely packed molecules sitting atop a surface such as gold. A self-assembled monolayer of 1-adamantane-thiolate, which does not […]