Highlights

While electronics have become much smaller and more powerful, an elusive goal has been to “print” these tiny devices rapidly over very large areas.

PCCM is partnering with the Cornell, Northwestern, and MIT MRSECs to create an innovative new online collaborative research community of REU students across the country in the NSF-sponsored NSDL MatDL “Soft Matter Wiki” pilot program of the Materials Digital Library (MatDL), part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project.

Materials Camps for teachers, plus PCCM’s Princeton University Materials Academy (P.U.M.A.) and Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs, have resulted in a for-credit materials science curriculum in local high schools.

Surfactant adsorption at solid-liquid interfaces is important in many industrial processes, including corrosion inhibition, dispersion stabilization, and lubrication. Furthermore, surfactant adsorption may provide novel and exciting means to guide soft materials to self-assemble into a myriad of tailored shapes. Recently, PCCM researchers have made a breakthrough in elucidating the physical mechanisms behind surfactant self-assembly on […]

While many approaches have been developed over the years to transfer patterns onto flat surfaces, faithfully transferring patterns onto curves substrates remains a major obstacle to the development of large-area electronics. Recently, PCCM researchers have successfully patterned domed polyester substrates with metal stripes (gold, silver, etc.).

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.

PCCM researchers have discovered a new method for making gratings: by prying apart two rigid plates that sandwich a thin, glassy polymeric film. The process fractures the film into complementary sets of ridges on each plate, with the ridges on one corresponding to the valleys on the other. The technique produces patterns with periodic spacing […]

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 […]