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The Nebraska MRSEC Professor/Student Pairs Program brings in a professor and a student from non-research intensive four-year institutions to conduct research with Nebraska MRSEC scientists. The goal is to offer a research experience which benefits both the participants and the MRSEC projects.

The Renewable Energy MRSEC at the Colorado School of Mines was instrumental in establishing a renewable energy undergraduate minor  that is unique because it features both a renewable energy track and a traditional energy track.  This approach is important because both types of energy will be important for the foreseeable future.

Limited performance and reliability of electronic devices at extreme temperatures, intensive radiation found in space exploration missions and earth-based applications requires the development of alternative computing technologies. Nebraska MRSEC researchers have designed and prototyped the world’s first high-temperature thermal diode. They have demonstrated the use of near-field thermal radiation from smooth and metamaterial surfaces to achieve thermal rectification at high temperatures. They named the technology NanoThermoMechanical thermal computing.

This research focuses on theoretical prediction of strong coupling between the THz excitations in a topological insulator (TI) and a III-V quantum well, providing a potential material platform for optoelectronic device applications in the THz frequency domain.

Crushing a soda can from top to bottom is easier if it is dented initially on the side. Predicting the force needed to crush a dented can, however, which is of critical importance for structural reliance of materials engineering is quite challenging.

Color centers in diamond are a promising platform for quantum information science, as they can serve as solid state quantum bits with efficient optical transitions. Much recent attention has focused on the negatively charged NV center in diamond, which can be measured and initialized optically, exhibits long spin coherence times at room temperature, and has narrow, spin-conserving optical transitions.

Precise synthetic control of the local electronic structure of metal centers within materials offers the potential to realize exotic physical properties. In particular, tuning the electronic structure of metal centers enables the creation of strongly correlated electron systems, enabling the exploration of fundamental questions about magnetism and superconductivity. In a new seed project within the Northwestern University MRSEC, novel classes of mixed anion materials are being synthesized in an effort to realize new correlated electron properties and related quantum phenomena.

The cytoskeletal component actin plays a crucial role in various cellular functions, including cell shape regulation and intracellular transport, by forming filaments and networks. Despite the current understanding of actin's morphological versatility, the impact of crowded environments—specifically how actin filaments organize into bundles and how this organization changes the protein secondary structure—remains under-explored. Here, we used two-dimensional infrared (2D IR) spectroscopy and structure based spectral calculations to map out structural changes of actin filaments under two degrees of crowding and bundling.

The interplay of charge, spin, lattice, and orbital degrees of freedom in correlated materials often leads to rich and exotic properties. Recent studies have brought new perspectives to bosonic collective excitations in correlated materials. MRSEC researchers with UT Austin report phonon properties resulting from a combination of strong spin–orbit coupling, large crystal field splitting, and trigonal distortion in CTO.

The Princeton MRSEC has detected a unique quantum property of an elusive particle, the Majorana fermion that is notable for behaving simultaneously like matter and antimatter. Using enhanced scanning tunneling microscopy techniques, the team captured signals from the Majorana particle at both ends of an atomically thin iron wire stretched on the surface of a crystal of lead.