In a human body, phospholipids form all kinds of different membranes and self-arrange into different objects. Some form unstable tubes. Such tubes in water may serve as templates for making nanotubes which may store drugs or other chemicals, or may suck up other species.

A soft cantilever beam, which can detect a very weak force, has been used by IRG1 researchers to uncover a striking property of cuprate superconductors: that trace supercurrents surrounding magnetic flux vortices persist for tens of degrees above the superconducting transition temperature Tc. The field needed to unbind these paired electrons is 60-100 times stronger than that inside a clinical MRI machine.

Princeton scientists have developed a new method for making gratings by prying apart two rigid plates that sandwich a thin, glassy polymeric film. The process fractures the film into complementary sets of ridges on each plate, with highly uniform ridge spacings ranging from 200 nm to 200 Â’µm, scaling directly with the film thickness.

A team of Princeton researchers has developed an enabling technique for manufacturing electro-optical devices from organic semiconductors. The method relies on a modeling framework to describe different material transfer modes that occur when the organic materials are "stamped" onto an already patterned substrate, which allowed the Princeton team to cleanly transfer an organic thin film from a stamp to a patterned substrate without leaving any voids.

A collaboration of experimentalists and theorists at the Chicago MRSEC has discovered a new, general route for creating nanoparticle monolayers that retain order across millions of particles, without holes, while staying compact over macroscopic distances[1].

When a marble or ball-bearing is dropped onto a bed of fine, loose sand, one first observes a broad splash of sand at impact. Then, a tall jet of granular material shoots up vertically. Experiments at the Chicago MRSEC in collaboration with researchers from the APS at Argonne have tracked the birth and evolution of these granular jets using the fastest x-ray based imaging performed to date (6000 video frames per second)[1].

In March, a group of physicists from the Chicago MRSEC visited Washington DC to talk about science to Congressional Representatives, their staff, and others. The message: basic research is vital to America's economy and our childrens' futures. In the photo, current MRSEC Director, Sidney Nagel (left) demonstrates the properties of materials to CUNY Prof. Myriam Sarachik (former President of the APS) and U.S. Rep. Vernon J.