(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab); the University of California, Berkeley; and Northwestern University have developed a way to engineer pseudo-bonds in materials. Instead of forming chemical bonds – which is what makes epoxies and other composites tough – the chains of molecules entangle in a way that is fully reversible. The researchers attached polystyrene chains to 100-nanometers-diameter silica particles to create “hairy particles.” These hairy particles self-assembled into a crystal-like structure, and the space available to each polystyrene chain depended on its position in the structure. While some chains became rigid under confinement, others ultimately disentangled and stretched. The result was a strong, tough, thin-film material, held firmly together by pseudo bonds of tangled polystyrene chains. The research was conducted, in part, at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy)
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of California, Berkeley; and Adamas Nanotechnologies Inc. in Raleigh, NC, have encased nanodiamonds – diamonds that are less than 100 nanometers in size – in tiny moving droplets of water to improve quantum sensing, a technology that uses quantum mechanics to measure physical quantities with high precision. As the droplets flowed past a laser and were hit by microwaves, the nanodiamonds gave off light. The amount of light in the presence of a microwave field was related to the materials around the nanodiamond, letting scientists determine whether a chemical of interest was nearby.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from Cornell University and the Army Research Laboratory have devised a new method for designing metals and alloys that can withstand extreme impacts. When a metallic material is struck at an extremely high speed, it immediately ruptures and fails. The reason for that failure is embrittlement – the material loses its ability to bend without breaking – when deformed rapidly. The researchers created a nanocrystalline alloy made of copper and tantalum in which dislocations could barely move more than a few nanometers before they were stopped in their tracks, effectively suppressing embrittlement. Dislocations are tiny defects that move through a crystal. During rapid, extreme strains, the dislocations accelerate and interact with lattice vibrations, which create substantial resistance that leads to embrittlement.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers from the Molecular Foundry, a user facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Columbia University, and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain have developed a new optical computing material from photon-avalanching nanoparticles. This approach offers a path toward realizing smaller, faster components for next-generation computers by taking advantage of intrinsic optical bistability – a property that allows a material to use light to switch between two different states, such as glowing brightly or not at all. For decades, researchers have sought ways to make a computer that uses light instead of electricity. But in previous studies, optical bistability had almost exclusively been observed in bulk materials that were too big for a microchip and challenging to mass produce. Now, the researchers suggest that the new photon-avalanching nanoparticles could overcome these challenges in realizing optical bistability at the nanoscale.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown University, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report. “Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, senior author of a paper on the research and principal investigator in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT.