News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Date Published
(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy)

This article reviews an article published in the journal Science that presents a comprehensive analysis of two decades of energy storage research involving nanomaterials. The article’s authors lay out a roadmap for how this technology can enable the world's urgent shift toward better energy storage devices and sustainability.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)

Scientists at Columbia University have demonstrated a new way to tune the properties of two-dimensional materials simply by adjusting the twist angle between them. The researchers built devices consisting of monolayer graphene encapsulated between two crystals of boron nitride and, by adjusting the relative twist angle between the layers, they were able to create multiple moiré patterns. Moiré patterns are of high interest to condensed matter physicists and materials scientists, who use them to change or generate new electronic material properties.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)

Scientists at Columbia University have demonstrated a new way to tune the properties of two-dimensional materials simply by adjusting the twist angle between them. The researchers built devices consisting of monolayer graphene encapsulated between two crystals of boron nitride and, by adjusting the relative twist angle between the layers, they were able to create multiple moiré patterns. Moiré patterns are of high interest to condensed matter physicists and materials scientists, who use them to change or generate new electronic material properties.

(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made one of the highest-performance cameras ever. The camera is composed of sensors made from superconducting nanowires, which can detect single photons, or particles of light. With more than 1,000 sensors, or pixels, the camera may be useful in future space-based telescopes searching for chemical signs of life on other planets, and in new instruments designed to search for the elusive “dark matter” believed to constitute most of the “stuff” in the universe.

(Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made one of the highest-performance cameras ever. The camera is composed of sensors made from superconducting nanowires, which can detect single photons, or particles of light. With more than 1,000 sensors, or pixels, the camera may be useful in future space-based telescopes searching for chemical signs of life on other planets, and in new instruments designed to search for the elusive “dark matter” believed to constitute most of the “stuff” in the universe.

(Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Researchers at Purdue University have engineered ceramic "nanotubes" that behave as thermal antennas, offering control over the spectrum and direction of high-temperature heat radiation. The work is part of a larger search in the field for a wide range of materials that can withstand higher temperatures.

(Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

Researchers at Purdue University have engineered ceramic "nanotubes" that behave as thermal antennas, offering control over the spectrum and direction of high-temperature heat radiation. The work is part of a larger search in the field for a wide range of materials that can withstand higher temperatures.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)

Scientists from Stony Brook University have developed a new approach for making metal-metal composites and porous metals with a 3-D interconnected “bicontinuous” structure in thin films at size scales ranging from tens of nanometers to microns. Metallic materials with this sponge-like morphology could be useful in catalysis, energy generation and storage, and biomedical sensing.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)

Scientists from Stony Brook University have developed a new approach for making metal-metal composites and porous metals with a 3-D interconnected “bicontinuous” structure in thin films at size scales ranging from tens of nanometers to microns. Metallic materials with this sponge-like morphology could be useful in catalysis, energy generation and storage, and biomedical sensing.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)

A scientific team from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University has made the first experimental observation of a material phase that had been predicted but never seen. The newly discovered phase couples with a known phase to enable unique control over material properties - an advance that paves the way to eventual manipulation of electrical conduction in two-dimensional materials such as graphene.