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

Chemists at Rice University working with researchers at the Ford Motor Company have turned plastic parts from "end-of-life" vehicles into graphene via the university's flash Joule heating process. To test whether end-of-life, mixed plastic could be transformed, the scientists ground the shredder "fluff" made of plastic bumpers, gaskets, carpets, mats, seating, and door casings from end-of-life F-150 pickup trucks to a fine powder. Powder heated between 10 to 16 seconds in low current produced a highly carbonized plastic, accounting for about 30% of the initial bulk. The other 70% was outgassed or recovered as hydrocarbon-rich waxes and oils.

Researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Regensburg in Germany have created a laser pulse that sidesteps the inherent symmetry of light waves. This laser pulse, which emits terahertz light, could be used to manipulate quantum information, potentially bringing us closer to room-temperature quantum computing. The researchers created this laser pulse by carefully engineering nanosheets of a gallium arsenide semiconductor to design the terahertz emission through the motion of electrons and holes – the spaces left behind when electrons move in semiconductors.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have developed 100-nanometer hollow spheres, called polymersomes, that safely and efficiently carried genetic material to triple-negative breast cancer tumors in mice. There, the genetic material knocked down expression of a repair enzyme and gave breast cancer-bearing mice a fourfold increase in survival. 

Today, most mirrors used to direct a beam in high-power lasers are made by layering thin coatings of materials with different optical properties. But if there is even one, tiny defect in any of the layers, the powerful laser beam will burn through, causing the whole device to fail. Now, researchers at Harvard University have built a mirror out of a single material: diamond. By etching nanostructures onto the surface of a thin sheet of diamond, the research team built a highly reflective mirror that withstood, without damage, experiments with a 10-kilowatt laser.

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have successfully created graphyne, a material that could rival the conductivity of graphene. Graphene is composed of carbons in the form of a regular array of hexagons (benzene rings); graphyne is also composed of benzene rings, but they are connected with one another through acetylene bonds (instead of carbon bonds, as in graphene). The scientists were able to create graphyne by using an organic chemical reaction called alkyne metathesis, as well as thermodynamics and kinetic control. 

Scientists at the University of Southern California have found that a protein called emerin responds to harmful mechanical forces on a cell by bunching together to form so-called "nanoclusters." The emerin nanoclusters help to stabilize and protect the membrane surrounding a cell’s nucleus from damage and rupture. The researchers also found that mutant forms of emerin known to cause muscular dystrophy were unable to correctly self-assemble, providing further evidence and understanding of emerin's role in muscular dystrophy. 

Forming metal into the shapes needed for various purposes can be done through processes that affect the sizes and shapes of the tiny crystalline grains that make up the bulk metal. Now, researchers at MIT have studied exactly what happens when these crystal grains form during an extreme deformation process, down to a few nanometers across. They discovered a "novel pathway" by which grains are forming down to the nanometer scale. The new pathway is a variation of a known phenomenon in metals called twinning.

A research team from Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia University has combined two emerging imaging technologies to better view a wide range of biomolecules, including proteins, lipids and DNA, at the nanoscale. Their technique brings together expansion microscopy and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy. Expansion microscopy is a technique that addresses the problem of diffraction limits in a wide range of biological imaging, and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy visualizes the chemical bonds of biomolecules by capturing their vibrational fingerprints.

A team of researchers from Yale University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, has built an intelligent sensor that can simultaneously detect the intensity, polarization, and wavelength of light. To build their sensing device, the research team used twisted double bilayer graphene – two atomic layers of natural stacked carbon atoms that are given a slight rotational twist. 

A team of researchers from Harvard University and MIT have described a new method for designing large-scale metasurfaces that uses techniques of machine intelligence to generate designs automatically. Metasurfaces use specifically designed and patterned nanostructures on a flat surface to focus, shape, and control light.