Kolodziejski and Ippen have begun new work with Wide Net Technologies on the use of supercollimating photonic crystal devices for chemical sensing applications.
Industrial Outreach - Section in Development :: R&D programs
OmniGuide Inc
IRG-I: Fink and Joannopoulos collaborate with OmniGuide Inc. to develop self-monitoring high-power optical photonic band gap fibers.
Research and Development Programs
Researchers at the MIT MRSEC are engaged currently in a number of R&D partnerships with industry:
IRG-I: Fink and Joannopoulos collaborate with OmniGuide Inc. to develop self-monitoring high-power optical photonic band gap fibers. Kolodziejski and Ippen have begun new work with Wide Net Technologies on the use of supercollimating photonic crystal devices for chemical sensing applications.
IRG-II: Rubner and Cohen have recently launched a number of new collaborations with industry that are a direct outgrowth of fundamental research in the MRSEC. They work with Toyota on the development of structural color pigments for car paint, with Essilor Corporation on the development of anti-fog coatings for eyewear, with Bayer Corporation on functional coatings for use in architectural elements, with Teledyne on self-decontaminating surfaces, and with Agilitron on a NASA program to create UV-anti-reflection coatings for space telescopes. All of these projects were made possible by basic discoveries made within IRG-II.
IRG-IV: Sadoway is involved with Zinc Matrix Power on the manufacturing of zinc-silver batteries– an important collaboration with industry that includes adoption of materials developed in the MRSEC.
IBM
C.J. Hawker (UCSB) and T.P. Russell (UMASS) A collaboration between researchers supported by the NSF-MRSEC programs at UC Santa Barbara, UMASS Amherst, and CPIMA has led to a revolutionary chip breakthrough that promises to be used in every future microelectronic device. Exploiting novel chemistry and physics, nanoporous thin films have been fabricated from self assembling block copolymers in a lithographic process that allows traditional dielectric materials to be replaced by air. This permits chips to run faster and use less energy. This is a significant advance in exploiting nanotechnology and enhances the competitiveness of US companies in this critical industry. According to Dr. John Kelly, IBM’s senior vice president of research and development, “To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used nanoscale self-assembled materials to build things that machines aren’t capable of doing.”
Q-Sense
Q-Sense AB was founded in 1996 by a group of researchers at Applied Physics, Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden where QCM related research had been going on since the 1970s. The research group discovered and patented (1995) a whole new way of extracting mass and viscosity parameters for surface analysis in liquid, based on the quartz crystal microbalance (QCM).
Q-Sense technology makes it possible to study how various molecules interact with different surfaces or with each other. Information about the mass of the bound molecules and how they adsorb or interact can be ascertained. To get real-time, structural information about the adsorption/interaction of e.g. proteins interacting with optional surface is truly unique and possible thanks to the so-called D-factor.