The recent decade has seen an explosion of optical communication. Yet much of the information processing is conducted electronically since there have been few truly tunable optical devices. Ferroelectric materials offer a potential solution. They possess interesting nonlinear properties that can be used to design and fabricate unique active tunable nanophotonic devices.
In eukaryotic cells, kinesin motor proteins transport intracellular cargo along microtubules, 25 nm protein filaments that form the cell cytoskeleton.
In 2004, a Penn State MRSEC team showed that bimetallic platinum/gold nanorods could swim at speeds up to 20 microns per second by catalyzing the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Nickel stripes added to the motors allowed them to be steered using weak magnetic fields as a "remote control". Microgears formed from platinum and gold rotated in hydrogen peroxide solutions.
Frustration is not only a state of mind, but also a state of matter wherein the interactions among different subunits cannot all be satisfied.
Molecules come in well-defined lengths: Penn State MRSEC researchers have invented a technique called "Molecular Rulers," in which molecular layers of precisely defined widths coat preexisting structures and form templates for patterning new structures with ever-smaller dimensions.
Penn State researchers John Badding, Venkat Gopalan and Vincent Crespi, working in close collaboration with Pier Sazio at the University of Southhampton, have succeeded in a task that at first sight may seem impossible: depositing uniform, dense conformal semico
Penn State researchers have designed a new patterning strategy, microdisplacement printing, which can stamp complex chemical patterns onto a substrate without mixing between the different "inks." A self assembled monolayer is a single layer of highly ord
