Skip to content Skip to navigation

Program Highlights for year 2013

Complexity from Simplicity. Very Fine Art: Stunningly Beautiful Microscale Sculptures

 Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake.

Hydroglyphics – Visualizing Patterns from Wetting Contrast. Writing Secret Messages with Water

Joanna Aizenberg and her colleagues at the Harvard MRSEC developed Hydroglyphics to use readily accessible and safe materials to visually demonstrate the differences between hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces to a broad audience. This hands-on learning activity has been effective at teaching both elementary school students and their parents.

Perfectly Organized Gold Nanorings

Creating well-organized conducting nanostructures in a flexible polymer matrix provides platforms for numerous applications in optics, sensors, and wave-guiding structures.  Working in the Materials Research Science and

Fisheye Lens Conoscopy with the iPhone

LCMRC researchers, motivated by a request from one of the Center's spin-off companies, have developed fisheye

The Twist-Bend Nematic phase

LCMRC researchers have found an extraordinary nematic liquid crystal phase, a new entry in the most widely studied and widely applied class of liquid cr

Coupling a Single Electron Spin to a Microwave Cavity

IRG-D researchers at Princeton University have combined superconducting qubit technology with single spin devices, demonstrating that the microwave field of a superconducting resonator is sensitive to the spin of a single electron. The device may allow two spatially separated electron spins to be coupled, resulting in quantum entanglement.

A Key Signature of Dirac Fermions

In solids, the kinetic energy of an electron generally increases as the square of its momentum. By contrast, in a Topological Insulator such as Bi2Te2Se, electrons on the surface are predicted to be Dirac Fermions for which the energy increases linearly with momentum. In a magnetic field B, the

Pages