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

Simulations on the Texas Advanced Computing Center's Frontera supercomputer have helped scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Macau (Macao, China) map, for the first time, the conditions that characterize polarons in two-dimensional (2D) materials. A polaron is a quasiparticle consisting of an electron and its surrounding distortions of atoms in a crystal lattice. Understanding polarons can help improve the performance and efficiency of touchscreens for phones and tablets and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) of OLED TVs.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have demonstrated a caterpillar-like soft robot that can move forward and backward and can dip under narrow spaces. The caterpillar-bot's movement is driven by a novel pattern of silver nanowires that use heat to control the way the robot bends, allowing users to steer the robot in either direction.

In a major breakthrough in the fields of nanophotonics and ultrafast optics, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have demonstrated the ability to dynamically steer light pulses from conventional, so-called incoherent light sources. This ability to control light using a semiconductor device could allow low-power, relatively inexpensive sources like light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or flashlight bulbs to replace more powerful laser beams in new technologies such as holograms, remote sensing, self-driving cars, and high-speed communication.

Researchers from Syracuse University and the State University of New York-Upstate Medical University (Syracuse, NY) have devised a tiny, nano-sized sensor capable of detecting protein biomarkers in a sample at single-molecule precision. A tiny protein binder fuses to a small hole created in the membrane of a cell – known as a nanopore – which allows ionic solution to flow through it. When the sensor recognizes a targeted molecule, the ionic flow changes. This change in flow serves as the signal from the sensor that the biomarker has been found.

The human body is made up of thousands of tiny lymphatic vessels that ferry white blood cells and proteins around the body, like a superhighway of the immune system. If damaged from injury or cancer treatment, the whole system starts to fail, and when lymphatic vessels fail, their ability to pump out fluid is compromised. The resulting fluid retention and swelling, called lymphedema, is both uncomfortable and irreversible. Now, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new treatment using nanoparticles that can repair lymphatic vessel pumping.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Pennsylvania, and Pro-Vitam Ltd in Romania have created tiny "bow ties" that are self-assembled from #nanoparticles. The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for #MachineVision and producing medicines.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that a famous fluid dynamics equation, discovered by Walter Nernst and Albert Einstein in the beginning of the 20th century, breaks down completely under strong spatial confinement inside carbon nanotube pores. The Nernst-Einstein equation, as it is known, is an essential building block of several important theories of ion transport.

Due to their considerable efficiency, catalysts made of just a few atoms show great promise in the field of water treatment. In a new study, researchers from Yale University, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Guangdong University of Technology in China have looked into how to optimize the performance of these nanocatalysts and make them viable for practical use. "We didn't have this capability before, but now we are basically loading single-atom metals, atom by atom, onto the substrate," said Jaehong Kim, one of the scientists involved in this study.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida have created the first environmentally friendly, large-scale, and multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants. "The range of colors and hues in the natural world are astonishing – from colorful flowers, birds and butterflies to underwater creatures like fish and cephalopods," said Debashis Chanda, one of the scientists involved in this study. Based on such bio-inspirations, Chanda's research group innovated a plasmonic paint, which uses nanoscale structural arrangement of colorless materials – instead of pigments – to create colors.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Boston University, and Northwestern University have discovered a method for introducing spinning electrons as qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers – in a host nanomaterial. Their test results revealed record long coherence times – the key property for any practical qubit, because it defines the number of quantum operations that can be performed in the lifetime of the qubit.