Tackling grand challenges in the materials science of liquids and glasses and non-equilibrium magnetism.
Two Superseed projects and one Seed project have been awarded funding to pursue research as part of the Wisconsin Materials Research Science and Education Center (MRSEC). The collaborative Superseed and Seed projects will enhance the ongoing materials research of the Center and support the exploration of transformative new directions.
UW–Madison engineers and Field Day Lab game designers have developed options for productive screen time that kids at home during the COVID-19 pandemic can benefit from and enjoy. Educational and fun video games aimed at middle and high school students are available free.
The MRSEC Open Science prize recognizes a researcher or research team that has demonstrated an exceptional effort or success in the development and dissemination of impactful data for the scientific community. With the transformative developments in data access and analytics, development and dissemination of impactful data sets is an increasingly important part of modern materials science. This prize seeks to encourage researchers to develop innovative strategies to share their data.
During the 2019 BREW Education Workshop, attendees were asked to evaluate, refine, extend, and hack three outreach activities that are currently under development in the MRSEC.
Camille Bishop, a 5th-year graduate student working in Mark Ediger’s group as part of the MRSEC IRG 1, presented her work on liquid crystal-like order in vapor-deposited glasses at the Gordon Conference on Liquid Crystals in New London, NH that took place from July 7th-12th, 2019. The conference brings together researchers in a diverse range of disciplines involving liquid crystal science and technology.
Yajin Chen presented her work on the use of solid-phase epitaxy to create epitaxial complex-oxide interfaces that have promising electronic properties at the APS March Meeting 2019 in Boston, MA.
Peng Zuo, a postdoc working in the MRSEC IRG 2, presented his group’s work on the system of PrAlO3/SrTiO3 created by solid phase epitaxy at the International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy (ICCGE-19) in Keystone CO, July 28-August 2, 2019. In the work presented, a layer of g-Al2O3 was observed epitaxially grown at the …
Highlighting her recent work with the MRSEC Interdisciplinary Research Group on Complex Metal Oxides, graduate student, Tesia Janicki, brought home an award for best poster from the 51st Midwest Theoretical Chemistry Conference (MWTCC) in June.
The Wisconsin MRSEC is developing an ultrafast direct electron camera for use on a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) in its Shared Instrument Facilities. One application of the camera will be experiments to map strains – tiny variations in the distance between atoms – inside materials caused by defects in the crystal lattice or interfaces between two different materials. The MRSEC acquired an existing, slower camera to support technique development before the new camera arrives. An example strain map is shown to the right. The gray-scale image is a small Nb particle formed inside a larger Zr crystal. The color image shows the rotation of the Zr lattice caused by the interface between the two materials. Higher sensitivity maps covering larger areas with more points will be possible with the new camera.
Bacteria communicate via molecular signals that they produce in high concentrations. Bacterial communication promotes the formation of biofilms that can be harmful to humans and costly to industry. We have shown that collections of individual bacterial signaling molecules interact in water to form soft materials (“self-assemble”) with spherical, layered, or cylindrical structures. Simulation images showing the formation of a spherical structure (“micelle”) are shown with corresponding experimental images.