Crystalline silicon is a critically important electronic material in all consumer electronic products. The ability to create fibers from this material would open up exciting vistas for a new generation of fiber-based electronic and optical devices. Traditional fiber-optic drawing involves a thermally mediated geometric scaling where both the fiber materials and their relative positions are i
Monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) is a 3-atom thick material with a direct band gap, making it of interest for fundamental science as well as applications in optoelectronics and chemical sensing. Our innovation is a scalable method for “seeded growth” of high quality monolayer MoS2 at controlled locations, which is an important advance towards useful applications of the material.
How can we wrap a 3d object with a sheet of paper without folds? Wrapping implies the ability to stretch as much as bend. Using concepts from fractal geometry, we have designed and realized a new class of materials with unprecedented control of stretchability and bendability to conformally wrap any shape or expand to nearly any predetermined shapes.
In 2015 we will celebrate the arrival of our 600th REU student in our NSF-supported REU program. This program started in 1989 with a small grant that supported 5 minority students.
A central goal of IRG-4 is to use collective interactions between dissimilar nanocrystals to enhance the performance of their assemblies.Here we demonstrate plasmonic enhancement of optical upconversion luminescence within nanorod-nanophosphor heterodimers (Fig 1a-c).
In crystalline materials, topologial defects such as dislocations mark flow defects, or “soft spots,” corresponding to local regions that are likely to rearrange due to thermal fluctuations or an applied load. In disordered packings, it is extremely difficult to identify the corresponding soft spots.
Dendrimers are branched molecules of precise chemistry, and Janus-dendrimers are dendrimers that have two distinct faces, with unique chemistry corresponding to each face. Here, we made a library of carbohydrate containing glycodendrimers (GD) that self assemble into vesicles – a structure that mimics biological materials such as viruses.
Chromonic liquid crystals (CLCs) are different from typical LCs used in displays, in part because they “live” in water and thus hold untapped potential for coupling LC phenomenology with biological media. Furthermore, CLCs twist very easily compared to bend and splay deformation, and the consequences of this giant elastic anisotropy are not well understood.
