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Program Highlights

Magnetic Frustration by Design: Spins Can't Always Get What They Want

Frustration is not only a state of mind, but also a state of matter wherein the interactions among different subunits cannot all be satisfied.

Molecular Rulers: A Marriage of Molecules and Metal

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.

Fiber Integration: Semiconductors encased in glass

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

Nanocar: Smooth Ride on Fullerene Wheels

In MRSEC-sponsored research, Kevin Kelly, Andrew Osgood, Yasuhiro Shirai, James Tour and Yuming Zhao at Rice university have produced a nanometer-scale car with fullerene wheels that rotate

Microdisplacement: Printing patterns with diverse inks

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

Engineered Evolution of Inorganic-Binding Peptides

Based on the similarity of the sequences of combinatorially selected peptides that have similar binding characteristics, we developed a bioinformatics approach that provides a general and simple methodology to quantitatively categorize a large number of inorganic binding peptides.

Simulations of Polyphenylacetylene (PPA) "Foldamers". Vijay Pande, Stanford University.

What are PPA “foldamers” nonbiological polymers that fold model systems for self-assembling nano structures challenge for simulation: long timescale and complex dynamics  New results longer chains considerably are more complex: multiple traps and remarkable complexity

Toxicity of Citrate/Gold Nanoparticles on Human Dermal Fibroblasts

The nanoscale engineering is one of the most dynamic domains at the interface between electronics, physics, biology and medicine. As there is no regulation yet, concern about future health problems is raising. We have investigated the cytotoxicity of Citrate/Gold nanoparticles at different concentrations and times.

Asymmetrical Nanorings

The vortex state of a magnetic nanoring has special attributes of no magnetic poles nor stray fields. The circulatory magnetization can have two chiralities:, left-handed or right-handed, for storing "0" and "1", as shown in Fig. 1.

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