An inter-MRSEC collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Pennsylvania State University led to the discovery of a new technique that enables bidirectional control of the chemical potential in a topological insulator (TI).
There is an abiding interest in using nanocrystals as laser gain media due to their tunable emission wavelengths, low cost, and solution processability. However, it has been proven difficult to achieve low lasing thresholds suitable for practical applicatons.
Harvard hosted its first ever “Top Chef” competition, as part of Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Condensed Matter, now in its sixth year as a highly popular undergraduate course at Harvard.
Shape morphing systems may find potential application in smart textiles, autonomous robotics, biomedical devices, drug delivery and tissue engineering. Lewis and Mahadevan at the Harvard MRSEC have developed 4-D printing by creating a hydrogel-cellulose fibril ink that could be printed to induce a programmable shape change
Leveraged upgrades to Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope (S/TEM) and Focused Ion Beam System (FIB):
In solution-based synthesis, often doping efficiencies are low and dopants are excluded from the nanocrystals’ central cores. The research team developed a fundamentally different plasma-based process for synthesizing aluminum-doped zinc oxide nanocrystals.
Understanding the transport of electrons in films of touching nanocrystals is of central importance for their future use in printed electronic devices such as light emitting diodes, solar cells, or transistors. The research team developed a new theory that describes the transition of the electron conduction in doped nanocrystal films from a semiconducting to a metallic behavior.