The thermal properties of oxides are of interest for a number of important applications, including thermoelectrics, thermal barrier coatings, memristors, and fuel cells. MIT MRSEC researchers demonstrated, for the first time, the controllable impact of oxygen defects on the thermal conductivity of a reducible oxide. The thermal conductivity was modulated by varying the concentration of oxygen vacancies and reduced cations in oxide thin films treated under different annealing conditions.

Aligned liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft materials that exhibit reversible actuation akin to human muscles when thermally cycled above their nematic-to-isotropic transition temperature. Lewis and collaborators studied the effects of LCE ink composition, nozzle geometry, and printing parameters on director alignment.

• Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOS) provide superior performance and lower cost for next generation displays. However, instability under illumination remains a critical issue. • In this work, the photoconductivity decay was investigated to deduce deep trap density.

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the development of electronic devices using non-conventional soft matter materials, as a novel alternative to traditional solid-state electronic devices. Traditional solid-state devices are often fragile and usually are made of non-biocompatible materials. The possibility of producing resilient nano-electronic devices opens a new avenue to develop novel technology.  

In conventional machine learning, a computer is used to minimize a cost function that specifies a desired task, using global information about the entire network. We have now demonstrated how machine learning tasks can be learned and performed without either a computer or global information by taking advantage of physics via a scheme called coupled learning1. Specifically, twin variable-resistor networks are run under different boundary conditions and corresponding edges are compared against only each other for determining resistance updates2.

On March 21, 2015, Professor Bob Cava led an engaging prsentation for over 400 guests (two sessions) about the amazing properties of chemistry and materials science. Special guests, Kathryn Wagner, Dan Steinberg, and Professor Cava's graduate student researchers engaged children ages 9-14 and their parents with fun group activities, stimulating Q&A sessions, and exciting demonstrattions to enlighten the public about materials science research.

In October 2014, RT-MRSEC co-sponsored a “Research2Innovation” one-day workshop at Duke University, as part of Lens of the Market, a three-stage training program to provide scientists and engineers with the full range of knowledge required for successful translation of their research into commercial ventures.

Electronic nematicity, the spontaneous breaking of crystalline rotational symmetry, has been discovered in several strongly correlated electronic systems, including high Tc superconductors. Recently, several studies have suggested that the charge density wave in the kagome superconductor CsV3Sb5 breaks rotational symmetry—an intriguing possibility, as it would be a rare example of “three-state Potts nematicity,” in which there are three possible orientations in a hexagonal lattice. Here, we report that  CsV3Sb5 is probably not nematic, but it is very sensitive to isotropic strain.

Dendrimers are branched molecules of precise chemistry, and Janus-dendrimers are dendrimers that have two distinct faces, with unique chemistry corresponding to each face. Here, we made a library of carbohydrate containing glycodendrimers (GD) that self assemble into vesicles – a structure that mimics biological materials such as viruses. We show the vesicles have the ability to agglutinate lectin proteins at vesicle walls, owing to the chemistry and concentration of the carbohydrate.  Synthesis of these materials is the first step in the assembly of a synthetic virus.

Field-effect transistor (FET)-based biosensors allow label-free detection of biomolecules by measuring their intrinsic charges. We previously reported the extremely low limit of detection on electrical field effect-based sensors using crumpled graphene. Here, we use FETs with a deformed monolayer graphene channel for the detection of various biomarkers.