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

Researchers at the University of Chicago have found a new way to create and stabilize so-called “blue phase” liquid crystals, which are nanocrystals that have the properties of both liquids and crystals and can, in some cases, reflect visible light better than ordinary liquid crystals. Potential applications include display technologies that could be turned on and off with very small changes in size, temperature, or exposure to light, and sensors that can detect radiation within a certain wavelength. 

A team led by Georgia Tech researchers has discovered unexpectedly familiar behavior in an antiferroelectric material known as zirconium dioxide, or zirconia. They showed that as the microstructure of the material is reduced to a few nanometers in size, it behaves similarly to much better understood materials known as ferroelectrics. In the past few years, antiferroelectric materials have been increasingly studied for potential applications in modern computer memory devices.

Researchers have discovered familiar behavior in an antiferroelectric material. Prof. Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb, of Georgia Tech, who participated in this research, discusses the applications of SMART materials in a recent NNI podcast episode: https://youtu.be/PIjojolu7M8 

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Delft University of Technology have managed to scan a single protein. By slowly moving a linearized protein through a tiny nanopore, one amino acid at a time, the researchers were able to read off electric currents that relate to the information content of the protein. The new single-molecule peptide reader marks a breakthrough in protein identification, and opens the way toward single-molecule protein sequencing and cataloguing the proteins inside a single cell.

To build modern electrical circuits, researchers control silicon's current-conducting capabilities via doping. Silicon's 3D lattice, however, is too big for next-generation electronics, so researchers are experimenting with graphene, but the tried-and-true method for doping 3D silicon doesn’t work for 2D graphene. An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Columbia University developed a technique to dope graphene via a charge-transfer layer made of low-impurity tungsten oxyselenide (TOS). This combination of high doping and high mobility gives graphene greater #electrical #conductivity than that of highly conductive #metals, such as copper and gold.

An international team of researchers from the City College of New York has created an “excitonic” wire, or one-dimensional channel for excitons. By depositing the atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) crystal on top of a microscopically small wire, a thousand times thinner than a human hair, the team created a small, elongated dent in the 2D material, slightly pulling apart the atoms in the 2D crystal and inducing strain in the material. This device could one day replace certain tasks that are now performed by standard transistor technology.

Space missions, such as NASA's Orion that will take astronauts to Mars, are pushing the limits of human exploration. But during their transit, spacecraft encounter a continuous stream of damaging cosmic radiation, which can harm or even destroy onboard electronics. To extend future missions, researchers from MIT and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory have shown that transistors and circuits with carbon nanotubes can be configured to maintain their electrical properties and memory after being bombarded by high amounts of radiation.

Hydrogen is increasingly viewed as essential to a sustainable world energy economy because it can store surplus renewable power, decarbonize transportation, and serve as a zero-emission energy carrier. But conventional high-pressure or cryogenic storage pose significant technical and engineering challenges. To overcome these challenges, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories have turned to metal hydrides because they provide exceptional energy densities and can reversibly release and uptake hydrogen under relatively mild conditions. The scientists focused on a metastable metal hydride called alane, or aluminum hydride, and developed a nanoconfined material with improved thermodynamics of alane regeneration.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have taken advantage of quantum entanglement to generate an incredibly large bandwidth by using a thin-film nanophotonic device. This advance could lead to enhanced sensitivity and resolution for experiments in metrology and sensing and higher dimensional encoding of information in quantum networks for information processing and communications.

If you reduce the density of a material, its stiffness will also be reduced. But scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have noticed that materials that are based on sandwich nanotubes retained their stiffness at lower densities. Modelling by materials scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands showed that the material retained almost all of its stiffness when the nanotubes were created with more space between them.