The list of potential curricular connections and activities that can be done with a wind tunnel in middle school is almost endless. This project incorporates simple geometry, weather, lab skills, metric measurement, as well as having the students work through the design process and actually construct and test their creations. The project bridges math and science wonderfully with real world applications that the students can get excited about and really understand. The interactive approach of this project can not help but enhance a student’s learning.

AlN, deposited by molecular beam epitaxy and patterned by electron beam lithography, forms an effective capping layer for epitaxial graphene growth on C-face SiC.

In high speed devices, electrons are accelerated to high energy by a high electric field; to understand device performance, it is important to know how those “hot” electrons relax by scattering with each other and with the environment (the graphene lattice and the SiC substrate).

 Whispering Gallery Mode Carousel: Forces exerted by an evanescent light wave at the surface of a spherical glass resonator draw microscopic colloidal particles toward the resonator surface  Intensity of the red-shifted light provides an exponentially sensitive probe of the particle-resonator separation; wavelength probes the strength of the light-matter interaction Virus-sized nanoparticle (a.k.a. “nano-lander”) in orbit about a glass microsphere (a.k.a. “micro-moon) under the influence of light that generates a radial tractor beam and a tangential photon wind

The Roman God Janus has two faces, one to look forward plus one to look back, and now serves as inspiration for many to make ‘Janus particles’ with two (or more) functionalities.  Indeed, the successful design and engineering of future technology requires materials with increasingly complex structures.

We have designed and fabricated simple artificial protein scaffolds (we call them maquettes) that can transfer catalytic functions familiar in Nature into materials.  Our proteins, built just from four alpha helices, proved to be very simple and robust structural element for variety of functions.  To date, we have demonstrated that four-helical maquettes can

The dipole orientation in ferroelectrics, such as LiNbO3 and BaTiO3, can be controlled via application of an electric field and this can in turn affect surface properties.  In this project we have shown for both adsorbed organic molecules and metal atoms that adsorption energies and activation energies for surface reactions are a function of the dipole orientation.

Hydrogels undergo volume changes when immersed in water, the degree of which is determined by the network chemical composition and crosslinking.

Molecular semiconductors are important materials for technology applications, such as solar cells. Current research focuses on how to organize molecules  at interfaces for more efficient energy conversion.  Maryland MRSEC researchers and NIST collaborators  recently showed how the arrangement of molecules at a molecular junction impacts energy

Optical properties of nanomaterials are at the basis of a host of new technology and prototypes, including sensors, computing devices, and enhancing substrates for spectroscopy, yet fundamental understanding on how to tune such properties is just emerging. Researchers at Northwestern University have previously developed a method to accurately correlate the structure and properties of nanoparticles at the single particle level. This technique has now been used in a high throughput fashion to observe