Project descriptions

Getting spherical colloidal particles to self-assemble is hard enough, but we decided to try something even more difficult: getting nanowires to self-assemble. The goal of this project was to get long, thin nanowires to spontaneously braid themselves.

Viruses are ubiquitous: for every organism, there are multiple viruses that can infect it. Although we know much about the beautiful structures of viruses, and we understand how certain viruses (the ones that are bad for us) infect a cell, we know little...

To make a material that is colored, one normally uses a dye or pigment. But another way to make color is to make a nanostructure that reflects or scatters light so that waves of certain frequencies can constructively interfere. These nanostructured...

We are interested in making materials that have a negative index of refraction. No naturally occurring material that we know of has this property, but it could be achieved in an metamaterial . An optical metamaterial is composed of elements that are...

Using digital holographic microscopy, we study how colloidal particles bind to oil-water interfaces. Small particles have a natural affinity for interfaces, and this affinity can be used to control their self-assembly and make some interesting materials...

We use a fast imaging method called holographic microscopy to watch self-assembling systems. In a holographic microscope, the sample is illuminated by laser light, and the resulting image (or hologram) can be used to determine the 3D structure, position...

We do experiments on some of the simplest self-assembling systems, called "colloidal clusters," to understand the basic physics of self-assembly. The clusters consists of a small number (say, fewer than 10 or so) spherical colloidal particles that attract...

Short, custom-designed DNA molecules can be used to create "programmable" interactions between colloidal particles, meaning that we can control how the particles self-assemble through the DNA sequences. Currently we are trying to create colloids with...

We worked as part of a larger collaboration to build an artificial cell that mimics the behavior of a living cell. Our focus is on understanding and mimicking intracellular transport.