News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a key experimental device for future quantum physics-based technologies that borrows a page from current, everyday mechanical devices. The researchers coupled nanomechanical oscillators with a type of circuit that can store and process energy in the form of a qubit, or quantum "bit" of information. Using the device's qubit, the researchers can manipulate the quantum state of mechanical oscillators, generating the kinds of quantum mechanical effects that could someday empower advanced computing and ultraprecise sensing systems. 

Researchers at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) have analyzed the need for increased resilience in nanotechnology supply chains. The researchers examined how to assess the impacts of nanotechnology supply chain disruptions on the manufacturing bottom line, how to mitigate disruption to these supply chains, and how to increase the ability of these supply chains to recover.

Inspired by the eyes of trilobites, creatures that were distant cousins of horseshoe crabs, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a miniature camera featuring a bifocal lens with a record-setting depth of field—the distance over which the camera can produce sharp images in a single photo. The camera is composed of an array of tiny lenses, called metalenses, that are ultrathin films etched or imprinted with groupings of nanoscale pillars tailored to manipulate light in specific ways. To design the metalenses, the researchers studded a flat surface of glass with millions of tiny, rectangular nanometer-scale pillars. 

Using nanotechnology, scientists at Georgia State University have created a newly designed neuromorphic electronic device that endows microrobotics with colorful vision. The newly designed artificial vision device could have far-reaching applications for the fields of medicine, artificial intelligence, and microrobotics. 

Researchers at Rice University have shown, through computer simulations, why iodized salt lowers the reaction temperature in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) furnace necessary to form two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide. They discovered that iodized salt helps to skip some steps and leap high-energy barriers in conventional CVD growth to yield far more of an essential precursor to molybdenum disulfide. In its two-dimensional form, titanium disulfide is highly coveted for its semiconducting properties, which promise advances in electronic, optoelectronic, spintronic, catalytic, and medical applications.

In a discovery that could speed research into next-generation electronics and LED devices, researchers from the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and Yale University have developed the first reliable, scalable method for growing single layers of hexagonal boron nitride on graphene. Hexagonal boron nitride is the world's thinnest insulator; graphene is the thinnest of a class of materials called semimetals, which have highly malleable electrical properties and are important for their role in computers and other electronics.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska Lincoln and the University at Buffalo have crafted a new type of transistor, called a magneto-electric transistor, that generates less heat than a typical silicon-based transistor. Rather than depend on electric charge – as silicon-based transistors do – a magneto-electric transistor depends on spin, a magnetism-related property of electrons that points up or down and can be read, like an electric charge can, as a 1 or 0. The team underlaid graphene – an ultra-robust material just one atom thick – with chromium oxide. When applying voltage, the spins of the underlying chromium oxide pointed up or down, ultimately forcing the spin orientation of the graphene's electric current to veer left or right, respectively.

From new biomaterials to novel photonic devices, materials built through a process called bottom-up self-assembly are opening up pathways to new technologies, with properties tuned at the nanoscale. But to unlock the potential of these materials, researchers need to "see" into them so they can control their design and fabrication and enable the materials’ desired properties. Now, researchers from Columbia University and the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have imaged the inside of a novel material self-assembled from nanoparticles, with seven-nanometer resolution. 

A research team from Northwestern University and South China University of Technology in Guangzhou has demonstrated, for the first time, that a nano-sized material called a metal-organic framework is a stable and selective catalyst for breaking down polyester-based plastic into its component parts. Only three things were needed: plastic, hydrogen, and the metal-organic framework. An important bonus is that one of the component parts into which the plastic was broken down was terephthalic acid, a chemical used to produce plastic.

A major research challenge in the field of nanotechnology is finding efficient ways to control light, which is essential for high-resolution imaging, biosensors, and cell phones. Because light is an electromagnetic wave that carries no charge, it is difficult to manipulate it with voltage or an external magnetic field. To solve this challenge, engineers have already found indirect ways to manipulate light using properties of the materials from which light reflects. But the challenge is difficult on the nanoscale, because materials behave differently in atomically thin states. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Kenyon College, and the Air Force Research Laboratory have discovered a magnetic property in antiferromagnetic materials that allows for the manipulation of light on the nanoscale and simultaneously links the semiconductor material to magnetism, a gap that scientists have been trying to bridge for decades.