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

Engineers at the University of California San Diego and the University of California Berkeley have created light-based technology that can detect biological substances with a molecular mass more than 100 times smaller than previously possible. The researchers used plasmons, which are small fluids of electronic waves that can move back and forth in metallic nanostructures. The research could lead to the development of ultra-sensitive devices that can quickly detect pathogens in human blood and considerably reduce the time needed for patients to get results from blood tests.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine have designed and successfully tested an experimental, super-small package able to deliver molecular signals that tag implanted human cancer cells in mice and make them visible for destruction by the animals' immune systems. The team created polymer-based nanoparticles and injected them into the animals' tumors. Once inside a cancer cell, the water-soluble nanoparticle slowly degrades over a day and releases a ring of DNA that makes the cancer cell produce surface proteins that work like red flags to say, "I'm a cancer cell, activate defenses."

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine have designed and successfully tested an experimental, super-small package able to deliver molecular signals that tag implanted human cancer cells in mice and make them visible for destruction by the animals' immune systems. The team created polymer-based nanoparticles and injected them into the animals' tumors. Once inside a cancer cell, the water-soluble nanoparticle slowly degrades over a day and releases a ring of DNA that makes the cancer cell produce surface proteins that work like red flags to say, "I'm a cancer cell, activate defenses."

Researchers at Columbia University have discovered a new way to control the phase of light using 2D materials without changing its amplitude, at extremely low electrical power dissipation. The researchers demonstrated that by simply placing the thin material on top of passive silicon waveguides, they could change the phase of light as strongly as existing silicon phase modulators, but with much lower optical loss and power consumption.

Researchers at Columbia University have discovered a new way to control the phase of light using 2D materials without changing its amplitude, at extremely low electrical power dissipation. The researchers demonstrated that by simply placing the thin material on top of passive silicon waveguides, they could change the phase of light as strongly as existing silicon phase modulators, but with much lower optical loss and power consumption.

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered that atomic forces thought to be "weak" can actually exert more control than has been understood. The researchers explored the formation of zinc oxide through a process in which individual nanoparticles act as building blocks that attach to each other to form a larger crystal. This discovery could help better predict and eventually control manufacturing of semiconductor materials used in electronics and other industrial applications.

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered that atomic forces thought to be "weak" can actually exert more control than has been understood. The researchers explored the formation of zinc oxide through a process in which individual nanoparticles act as building blocks that attach to each other to form a larger crystal. This discovery could help better predict and eventually control manufacturing of semiconductor materials used in electronics and other industrial applications.

Van der Waals crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but manufacturing them has been limited by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Researchers at Columbia University have invented a new method using gold films to disassemble single van der Waals crystals layer by layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes.

Van der Waals crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but manufacturing them has been limited by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Researchers at Columbia University have invented a new method using gold films to disassemble single van der Waals crystals layer by layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes.

Metals get stronger as the size of the grains making up the metal gets smaller – up to a point. If the grains are smaller than 10 nanometers in diameter, the materials are weaker because, it was thought, they slide past each other like sand sliding down a dune. But researchers at Princeton University, the University of California, Berkeley, and at universities in China have shown that in samples of nickel with grain diameters as small as 3 nanometers, and under high pressures, the strength of the samples continued to increase with smaller grain sizes.