CBES researchers led by Chad Mirkin and Sharon Glotzer have uncovered a previously unknown property of colloidal crystals, highly ordered three-dimensional arrays of nanoparticles. The team engineered colloidal crystals with complementary strands of DNA and found that dehydration crumpled the crystals, breaking down the DNA hydrogen bonds. But when researchers added water, the crystals bounced back to their original state within seconds.

CBES senior investigator Danna Freedman has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow for “creating novel molecular materials with unique properties directly relevant to quantum information science,” the MacArthur Foundation announced. Each MacArthur Fellow will receive a grant of $800,000 over five years.

CBES researchers have taken inspiration from plants to revolutionize the way an important industrial chemical is made. In a first for the field, the team used light and water to convert acetylene into ethylene, a widely used, highly valuable chemical that is a key ingredient in plastics.

While this conversion typically requires high temperatures and pressures, flammable hydrogen and expensive metals to drive the reaction, the new photosynthesis-like process is much less expensive, less energy intensive and has a greater selectivity for ethylene. CBES senior investigator Emily Weiss was the corresponding author of the paper and CBES director Samuel Stupp was a coauthor.  

CBES senior investigator George Whitesides has received the 2022 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience along with Jacob Sagiv, Ralph Nuzzo and David Allara for their work on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on solid substrates, “which enable unprecedented control and engineering of surface properties,” according to the award committee.

“Their work transformed surface science and has led to applications shaping our daily lives in areas from medical diagnostics to semiconductor devices,” the committee wrote. Whitesides was specifically recognized “for leading the development of multiple applications and innovations of SAMs, in particular the invention of patterning of, with and using SAMs.”

In work led by CBES senior investigators Chad Mirkin and Sharon Glotzer, researchers demonstrated how complex crystals that mimic metals can be achieved with a new approach to guiding nanoparticle self-assembly.

Rather than just nanoparticles that serve as “atom equivalents,” the colloidal crystals produced by the team rely on even smaller particles that simulate electrons. The research yielded three complex, low-symmetry structures, including one called a triple double-gyroid that has no known natural equivalent.