This University of Pennsylvania program immerses students in hands-on materials research while incorporating a recently piloted initiative: training participants to become effective science communicators. While students spend 10 weeks conducting advanced research projects, they simultaneously develop crucial skills in translating complex scientific concepts for broader audiences, particularly younger students.
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania discovered a unique self-assembling network structure that forms when certain liquid crystal materials separate. These networks spontaneously create intricate patterns of filaments and disc-shaped structures through a series of physical transformations driven by competing forces.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College developed new non-invasive methods to measure the mechanical properties of defects in liquid crystals using magnetic fields and advanced imaging. The study revealed that the line tension of twist disclinations ranges from 75 to 200 piconewtons and increases logarithmically with sample thickness, providing crucial quantitative data for testing theoretical models of these defects.
MRSEC researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that introducing geometric disorder in mechanical metamaterials leads to distributed damage during failure, resulting in significantly enhanced fracture toughness with minimal loss of strength. This finding challenges the traditional reliance on periodic unit cell geometries in architected materials.
Researchers John Crocker and Andrew Liu at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that biopolymer networks pruned by tension-inhibited methods remain rigid at much lower coordinations than those pruned randomly. This finding helps explain the evolutionary advantage of tension-inhibited filament-severing proteins in biological systems.
By understanding the compositional boundaries of the Ga-based tetrahelices in the III-VI-VII class of 1D van der Waals helices, a MRSEC team at the University of California, Irvine demonstrated, for the first time, the discovery of a bulk single crystal that features weakly bound helical chains of GaSI which is characterized by a non-natural helical cross section in a “squircle” geometry (hybrid between a square and a circle).
A MRSEC team at the University of California, Irvine has developed a generic neural network kinetics framework to solve diffusion problems in compositionally complex materials (CCMs)—in the process, addressing a long-standing challenge in modeling diffusion and chemical ordering in CCMs.
Intercalation of air-stable monolayer Pb into EG/SiC by confinement heteroepitaxy (CHet) enables study of heavy metal films at the extreme limit of thinness with complementary microscopy and spectroscopy. Pb coverages up to 90% can be achieved at elevated temperatures beyond those of conventional ultrahigh vacuum methods.
AC electric double layer gating (EDL) periodically applies large electric fields to two-dimensional gallium to enable the detection of a permanent dipole moment in the 2D layer, using microreflectivity. This validates predictions that 2D metals will have a dipole resulting from non-centrosymmetric bonding.
High-entropy materials shift the traditional materials discovery paradigm to one that leverages disorder, enabling access to unique chemistries unreachable through enthalpy alone. A MRSEC team at Penn State University has developed a high-throughput framework for discovering and understanding the single-phase formation of high-entropy oxides by integrating computation and experiment in a self-consistent feedback loop. To more rapidly explore rock salt composition space, the team utilizes CHGNet machine-learning interatomic potentials with impressive accuracy even in disordered systems.
