(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
Scientists at Penn State have developed a new design for thermogels – materials that can be injected as a liquid and turn into a solid inside our bodies – that further improves these materials’ properties. The newly designed thermogels are made with nanoparticles that have sticky spots, similar to arms reaching out and giving the nanoparticles places to connect with one another and form a structure. The method may be especially appealing for soft tissue reconstruction, in which case thermogels could serve as structures that provide a framework for cells to stick to and form new, healthy tissue.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Modern electron microscopes can capture incredibly detailed images of materials down to the atomic level, but they require a skilled operator and can only focus on very small areas at a time. Now, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have created a n automated workflow that overcomes these limitations by allowing large amounts of data to be collected over wide areas without human intervention and then quickly transferred to supercomputers for real-time processing. Much of the work was done at The Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, two DOE Office of Science user facilities at Berkeley Lab.

(Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)
When materials are created on a nanometer scale, even the thermal energy present at room temperature can cause structural ripples. How these ripples affect the mechanical properties of these thin materials can limit their use in electronics and other key systems. Now, using a semiconductor manufacturing process, researchers from Binghamton University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Penn State, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have created alumina structures that are 28 nanometers thick on a silicon wafer with thermal-like static ripples, and then tested these ripples with lasers to measure their behavior. The results match with theories proposed about such structural ripples.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
An international team led by Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers has merged two lab-synthesized two-dimensional materials into a synthetic quantum structure once thought impossible to exist and produced an exotic structure expected to provide insights that could lead to new materials at the core of quantum computing. One slice of the quantum structure is made of dysprosium titanate, an inorganic compound used in nuclear reactors, while the other is composed of pyrochlore iridate, a new magnetic semimetal. The specific electronic and magnetic properties of the material developed by the researchers can help in creating very unusual yet stable quantum states, which are essential for quantum computing.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Science Foundation)
The shape of nanoparticles depends on the choice of solvent and temperature during their growth. But the tiny seed particles that form first and that guide the formation of final nanoparticle shapes are too small to measure accurately. With the help of a supercomputer, Penn State researchers have developed computer simulations to model seed particles with 100 to 200 atoms. They found that the shapes of the tiny particles depend on the solvent composition and temperature in unexpected ways. Surprisingly, in some cases the shape of the seed particle changes dramatically when only a single atom is added or removed.