The NYU team, led by Jasna Brujic, an assistant professor in NYU’s Department of Physics, developed an innovative way to tabulate the number of spheres-they created a method for determining how spheres pack from inside the jar, making it easier to more accurately count them.

A single electron spin in an external magnetic field forms a two-level system that can be used to create a spin qubit. However, achieving fast single spin rotations, as would be required to control a spin qubit, is a major challenge. It is difficult to drive spin rotations on timescales that are faster than the spin dephasing time and to individually address a single spin on the nanometer scale. We have developed a new method for quantum control of single spins that does not involve conventional electron spin resonance (ESR).

In designing new motile materials, much can be learned by studying the physical mechanisms underlying cell crawling. One important form of cell crawling is driven by self-assembly of the protein actin. In this process, energy is supplied and various proteins cooperate to assemble

In multiferroic materials, where magnetism and ferroelectricity coexist, it is possible to excite mixed spin and lattice vibrations with electromagnetic waves called electromagnons. We find that the mechanism responsible for electromagnons is different from the one that couples static magnetism and ferroelectricity. Our results show how the strong coupling of spin and lattice excitations produce the colossal electromagnon observed in RMnO3. This mechanism can also exist in non-multiferroic materials.

Block copolymer/nanoparticle (BCP/NP) composites have attracted interest because of the unique opportunities for tuning the properties of hybrid materials arising from the control of orientation and location of particle fillers within the copolymer matrix. However, quiescent organized block copolymer microstructures are not macroscopically uniform but rather exhibit ‘polycrystal-type’ texture with grain boundary defects that disrupt the long-range periodicity.

The video describes the Montclare lab research efforts to fabricate nano-scaled self-assembling proteins as materials. It focuses on the use of bacteria as the synthetic powerhouse for soft materials synthesis and features the self-assembly behavior of these biologically-inspired materials for potential use in therapeutic delivery and regenerative medicine. Watch video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbzpHRgrRBY

By tuning the optical lattice depth or the interaction between cold atoms, a weakly-interacting atomic bosonic superfluid can be converted into a strongly correlated Mott insulator. Near the phase boundary, quantum criticality, resembling that of Ising-type