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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 about axles and guide the motion of the nanocar across a substrate.

Why are 1-2 nm silicon quantum dots ideal as solar materials?            

Members of IRG-III of the MIT MRSEC have demonstrated a light emitting device application of such quantum dots. They show that white light can be generated in a layered device that combines organic semiconductor layers with a single monolayer of quantum dots. The composition and the sizes of the quantum dots were chosen to cover the color spectrum required for the perception of white light, as in an incandescent light bulb. The ability to synthesize nanomaterials with nearly atomic precision

As electronic devices shrink deep into the nano-scale, low-resistivities become essential.

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].

For hardness and stiffness, it's long been thought that nothing beats diamond. But Roderic Lakes and Don Stone, from the University of Wisconsin MRSEC and their colleagues have made a material that is almost ten times stiffer, by embedding small particles of barium titanate in a matrix of tin.

Novel electronic applications often result from fresh theoretical insights into long-familiar materials. Recently, strong interest has focused on the “topological insulators”, notably Bi2Se3and Bi2Te3. In these solids, the electrons on the surface display highly unusual properties. For example, they travel like massless particles (photons and neutrinos), and are much less susceptible to scattering by lattice imperfections. To date, much of the information on topological insulators has come from photoemission experiments and scanning tunneling microscopy.