During the academic year, F08 - S09, Olin undergraduates Sean Calvo, Caitlin Greeley, Stephani Gulbrandsen, and Leif Jentoft designed, built, and tested a flexible automated microscopy platform capable of imaging an area up to 100mm x 100mm with a resolution of 10 microns at 4.8 second per square mm.
Stabilized emulsions containing the oscillating Belousov - Zhabotinsky chemical reaction (BZ) show interesting dynamics. Each drop acts as an independent chemical clock. However, they chemically communicate and exhibit collective behavior. In (a) three photos of the same hexagonally packed 100 micron diameter BZ drops are shown 80 seconds apart.
The ability to modify the electronic structure and properties of graphene is an important step towards the large scale fabrication of electronic devices based on graphene technology.
Chemically-etched SrTiO3 is widely used as a clean, atomically-smooth template for epitaxical growth of most complex oxides. Since native point defects in these materials are electrically-active and mobile, there is a need to lower their density.
Graphene (2-D carbon) is being considered for spintronics due to its low spin-orbit coupling. While graphene-based devices are being made one-at-a-time successfully, there is a need for a high-throughput fabrication method.
To advance the application of organic molecular films in solar cells, PCCM researchers have improved their conductivity and carrier injection by n-doping the acceptor layer in a donor-acceptor cell. The acceptor was a fullerene layer, C60, while the dopant was the low-ionization-energy molecule decamethylcobaltocene (CoCp2*).
