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Highlights

Jul 16, 2013
Harvard University

Complexity from Simplicity. Very Fine Art: Stunningly Beautiful Microscale Sculptures

Aizenberg, Mahadevan, Harvard University

 Artists and material scientists alike bend, melt and mold materials into useful and aesthetically pleasing forms. But nothing human hands have made can match the intricacy of convoluted corals or the delicate and unique geometry of a snowflake. In work reported in Science (May 17, 2013), Aizenberg, Mahadevan, and coworkers exploited nature’s sculpting methods to create visually stunning 3-D structures that may change the way nano- and micro-materials are made.
Jul 16, 2013
Harvard University

Hydroglyphics – Visualizing Patterns from Wetting Contrast. Writing Secret Messages with Water

Joanna Aizenberg, Harvard University

Joanna Aizenberg and her colleagues at the Harvard MRSEC developed Hydroglyphics to use readily accessible and safe materials to visually demonstrate the differences between hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces to a broad audience. This hands-on learning activity has been effective at teaching both elementary school students and their parents.
Jul 10, 2013
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Perfectly Organized Gold Nanorings

S. Thayumanavan (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and T. Russell (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)

Creating well-organized conducting nanostructures in a flexible polymer matrix provides platforms for numerous applications in optics, sensors, and wave-guiding structures.  Working in the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Polymers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Thayumanavan and Russell achieved self-assembled hybrid structures from diblock copolymers and gold nanoparticles, where the
Jul 3, 2013
University of Colorado at Boulder

Materials Science from CU

MSFCU has been extraordinarily successful in reaching Colorado K-12 students with physical sciences presentations tuned for the Colorado curriculum. To date nearly 2000 classes have served over 78,000 
Jul 3, 2013
University of Colorado at Boulder

Fisheye Lens Conoscopy with the iPhone

LCMRC researchers, motivated by a request from one of the Center's spin-off companies, have developed fisheye lens conoscopy, one of the most significant developments in the characterization of the birefringence of materials in the last 150 years. Its implementation
Jul 3, 2013
University of Colorado at Boulder

The Twist-Bend Nematic phase

LCMRC researchers have found an extraordinary nematic liquid crystal phase, a new entry in the most widely studied and widely applied class of liquid crystals. In the whole history of liquid crystals only four distinct nematic ground states have been found: the uniaxial, the biaxial, and, for chiral molecules, the helical nematic and blue phases.
Jun 18, 2013
Princeton University

Coupling a Single Electron Spin to a Microwave Cavity

K. D. Petersson (Princeton University), L. W. McFaul (Princeton University), M. D. Schroer (Princeton University), J. M. Taylor (Joint Quantum Institute), A. A. Houck (Princeton University), J. R. Petta (Princeton University)

IRG-D researchers at Princeton University have combined superconducting qubit technology with single spin devices, demonstrating that the microwave field of a superconducting resonator is sensitive to the spin of a single electron. The device may allow two spatially separated electron spins to be coupled, resulting in quantum entanglement.  
Jun 18, 2013
Princeton University

A Key Signature of Dirac Fermions

Jun Xiong, Y.K. Luo, Y. H. Khoo, Shuang Jia, R. J. Cava and N. P. Ong (Princeton University)

In solids, the kinetic energy of an electron generally increases as the square of its momentum. By contrast, in a Topological Insulator such as Bi2Te2Se, electrons on the surface are predicted to be Dirac Fermions for which the energy increases linearly with momentum. In a magnetic field B, the allowed states of an electron are quantized into Landau Levels (LLs). The sequential emptying of occupied LLs in an increasing field leads to quantum