FORGES is a summer program designed to offer exposure and experience in collegiate-level STEM work to local high school students who are interested in a career or academic pathway in STEM. CHARM partners with University of Delaware departments and industry partners to provide hands-on activities, collegiate and industrial laboratory exposure, and interactions with faculty, students, and staff.
Despite being a primary experimental probe of spin-charge coupled dynamics and transport, there have been virtually no calculations of THz radiation from such systems since the inception of this field in 1996. The MRSEC team at the University of Delaware this longstanding problem by introducing two new complementary frameworks, which combine time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) or time-dependent nonequilibrium Green’s functions (TDNEGF) with Jefimenko solutions of the Maxwell equations.
Computationally designed tetrameric coiled coils, ranging from 8-29 amino acids, revealed a minimum of three heptads (21 amino acids) is necessary for stable coiled coil formation, establishing a minimum sequence for the creation of building blocks to construct nanostructured material.
This study develops new design approaches for specifying the mutual interactions between many interacting subunit species such that they self-assemble into a user-specified two-dimensional tiling with high yield. By enumerating and assembling a wide variety of tilings with increasing unit-cell size and complexity, the authors identify economical design rules for targeting tilings with the largest unit-cell sizes using the minimum number of components.
The MRSEC team at Brandeis University explained the origin of the solidification observed in contractile mixtures of motors and microtubules.
The MRSEC team at the University of Minnesota investigated the self-assembly phase behaviors of frustrated bottlebrush block terpolymers PLA-PEP-PS synthesized via sequential ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) of norbornene-functionalized poly(D,L-lactic acid) (PLA), poly(ethylene-alt-propylene) (PEP), and polystyrene (PS).
Measurements of the cycling endurance of LSCO, showing record cycling endurance by an order of magnitude. The IRG-1 team at the University of Minnesota used operando FTIR spectroscopy for the first time, correlated with electrochemical measurements, to gain mechanistic insight into endurance and the roles of relative humidity, device design, and electrode metal selection.
For the first time ever, the shape and mechanical response of millimeter-scale atomically thin polycrystalline films were probed in a mechanically free state using a counterintuitive solution: The MRSEC team at the University of Chicago float atomically thin films on water. Using this approach, they discovered that large scale membranes naturally wrinkle in a universal way, that is tunable, yet independent of atomistic details.
For biological organisms, training is well established as a means of achieving and maintaining targeted levels of performance. In similarly applying training to non-living materials key requirements are the ability of the material to adapt to external cues as well as to retain some memory once the cues are removed. With additional memories more complex responses can then be trained-in.
The OSU MRSEC team found that resonant fluctuating fields change relative population between spin states decreasing photoluminescence.
