The quest for economical devices with faster speeds, lighter weights, and higher feature density drives demand for new fabrication tools that create ever more complex patt

Infection by adenovirus is initiated when Knobs (globular protein domains) on the virus periphery bind to a CAR (Coxsackie-Adenovirus Receptor) membrane protein of the host cell.

The University of Maryland (UMD) MRSEC joined the NISE Network in the nation-wide effort to bring nanoscience to communities across the country during the week of March 29 - April 6, 2008.

The coupling of the magnetic and ferroelectric order in multiferroics produces new excitations of mixed magnetic (magnons) and lattice (phonons) character ; electro-magnons. The investigation of these novel excitations as has revealed that they are activated only through symmetric Heisenberg exchange, even in systems in which the static polarization arises from the relativistic antisymmetric exchange.

Multiferroic Y(Lu)MnO3 undergoes an isostructural transition at the magnetic Neel transition, producing giant atomic displacement for every atom in the unit cell. It appears that this happens without either soft-mode degrees of freedom or orbital degrees of freedom. This extremely large magneto-elastic coupling is unprecedented - larger by two orders of magnitude than in any magnetic materials.

Electrochemical oxidation of aluminum produces very regular arrays of nanopores. UMD-MRSEC researchers are mastering (1) nanopore synthesis and (2) deposition of coaxial multilayers of ultrathin films into the nanopores to create a new generation of devices for storing electrical energy that function as supercapacitors and batteries. These feature simultaneously higher power and higher energy storage than the best of today's devices, meeting the growing need for storing energy derived from new but intermittent sources (solar, wind, etc.).

Mobility measures how fast electrons travel in a material when an electric field (i.e.

Materials with a negative refractive index can form super-resolution planar lenses, sub-surface cameras or compact resonators which are otherwise impossible to realize. MRSEC researchers have predicted for the first time a tunable negative-index material with low loss, using liquid crystals, whose operating wavelength can be changed by controlling the liquid crystal orientation. Download

Bimetallic gold/platinum nanorod motors spontaneously move towards hydrogen peroxide fuel when they are placed in a fuel gradient, the first time this behavior has been seen outside of the biological world. Download