Highlights

Piezoeletric materials are used for a variety of actuator and sensor applications. Finding a Pb-free replacement for the popular Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 has been a major challenge for the community.

Motor proteins deliver intracellular cargo to specific locations inside cells. These so-called kinesin motors take 8 nm steps along intracellular highways 25 nm wide called microtubules. This transport machinery can be reassembled outside the cell and used to transport nanoscale cargo for separations, sensors, assembly, and other bio-mechanical devices.

Scaling functional machines down to the molecular scale is a key challenge in nanoscale science and technology. However, coaxing individual molecules into performing well-defined mechanical tasks requires radically different strategies than those used to build familiar macroscopic machines like electrical motors.

Normally, well, flaws are bad. But through a newly developed technique of microcontact insertion printing, Penn State researchers can use the flaws in a selfassembled monolayer to place individual isolated molecules in predetermined patterns on a gold substrate. A self-assembled monolayer is a tightly packed wellordered array of molecules covering a surface, all tilted to one side like a cornfield in a windstorm.

Thin-film transistors, already indispensable in a number of portable electronics, would benefit from optical transparency and compatibility with flexible, lightweight plastics. Transistors with these qualities would be a major advance if they could be fabricated by a scalable, large-area process.

Oxide ceramics are ubiquitous in modern society- ranging from capacitors in electronic gadgets to high-tech displays. In numerous future technologies, it is necessary to "pattern" ceramic oxides in various forms, e.g., dots and lines, at the nanometer scale.

The recent MRSEC Teacher Workshop at UCSB was a Great Success. Junior High and High School math and science teachers from Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles Counties visited the UCSB Materials Research Laboratory for a day of curriculum presentations and workshops.

To a packed audience of over 200 students and local residents, the UCSB MRL supported a public lecture on the subject of solid state lighting, emphasizing the promise of a much cleaner, more efficient, and longer-lasting lighting source. Santa Barbara architect

UCSB MRL researchers have recently developed a new way of seeing beneath clothing and other materials using a THz imaging system that employs a photoconductive switch for illumination and a zero-biased, Schottky diode for detection. Just like Superman, this novel Terahertz system penetrates textiles, in this case denim cloth from jeans, but does not use ionizing radiation and therefore poses a significantly reduced risk to human health when compared to x-rays.

Graphitic carbon - structural forms of the element that are constructed exclusively from carbon atoms having trigonal planar coordination - is ordinarily produced under drastic physical and conditions, typically at temperatures in excess of 500° C. Columbia MRSEC scientists have uncovered a process by which this form of matter can assemble at temperatures as low as 110° C. During their development of a low-temperature synthesis of nanocrystals of iron oxides, Drs.