News: Research

The Tian group introduced a hydrogel derived from the malva nut with multiple biomedical applications, from wound care to ECG readings. Their publication in Matter discusses the sustainable extraction process used isolate the nut’s polysaccharides and demonstrates its enhanced performance in biosignal recording and tissue regeneration.

The Vitelli Group designed a compound robot which use principles of odd elasticity and active materials to enable decentralized locomotion across challenging terrains. Their paper in Nature explains how each part exerts nonsymmetric and nonreciprocal forces to create a robust collective machine that senses and responds to its environment.
 

An Engel group article in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters describes unexpected behavior observed in electrons passing through a conical intersection. They found the final electronic population had drastically different vibrational coherences from those it started with, a first-of-its-kind observation that is  unexplained by the semiclassical theory on conical intersections.

The Scherer group introduced a method of calculating the entropy production rate of overdamped, non-conservative, N-body systems. Their article in Physical Review E uses a novel collective mode decomposition and force field decomposition to show that the rates of entropy production and power dissipation are equal in these systems, in agreement with a theorem by Seifert.

Sarah King and collaborators at UChicago, Chicago State University, and University of Illinois Chicago were awarded $4.8 million from the NIH BRAIN Initiative toward developing a novel PEEM microscope designed for brain connectomics.

The King group introduced a strategy for functionalizing a sulfur-containing transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) with multimolecular architectures.
Their article in ACS Applied Optical Materials describes how molecular adsorption in the growth and characterization of ion-linked bilayers offers a new pathway to introduce complex molecules onto sulfur-containing TMDs.

The Irvine group created a novel active matter system that can self propel, flock, and form a chiral active phase. Their publication in Nature Physics explains how a suspension of magnetic particles driven to spin at intermediate Reynolds numbers with a rotating magnetic field was able to behave as a synthetic active system.

The Mazziotti group observed a transition and coexistence between superconductor and exciton condensate states in a cuprate-like modeled material. Their publication in Physical Review Materials suggests that, in the three-band Hubbard model, increasing electron-electron repulsion moves the system’s state from superconductor to exciton condensate.

Quantum Flute

A general theory of non-reciprocal matter.

The Vitelli and Littlewood groups recently published a groundbreaking general theory of non-reciprocal matter using exceptional points and illustrated with examples found in simple systems such as groups of interacting toy robots. The work was original published in Nature in April and is now receiving wider attention via WIRED. Please see the links on the right and the UChicago News story as well.

Wired Story
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Continuing to transform electron beam technology
A collaboration of researchers led by Cornell University and including the University of Chicago has been awarded $22.5 million from the National Science Foundation to continue gaining the fundamental understanding needed to transform the brightness of electron beams available to science, medicine and industry.

­The Center for Bright Beams (CBB), an NSF Science and Technology Center, was created in 2016 with an initial $23 million award to Cornell and partner institutions, including the University of Chicago and affiliated Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The center integrates accelerator science with condensed matter physics, materials science and surface science in order to advance particle accelerator technologies, which play a key role in creating new breakthroughs in everything from medicine to electronics to particle physics.

The center’s goals are to improve the performance and reduce the cost of accelerator technologies around the world and develop new research instruments that transform the frontiers of biology, materials science, condensed matter physics, particle physics and nuclear physics, as well as new manufacturing tools that enable chip makers to continue shrinking the features of integrated circuits.

“CBB has brought together a remarkably broad palette of researchers encompassing scientists from physics, physical chemistry, materials research, and accelerator science—an unusually diverse team that has the necessary skills and long-range vision to take on the challenge of helping the next-generation of accelerators come to fruition, with impact on many fields,” said Steven J. Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute at the University of Chicago, and a co-leader of CBB’s next-generation superconducting radio frequency materials research. “My role has been profoundly rewarding for my research group and for me personally, introducing us to new research directions in advanced superconducting materials design that will ultimately lead to the innovation of lower-cost accelerators with greatly improved brightness and performance.”

Opening up new fields in quantum chemistry and technology.

Researchers have big ideas for the potential of quantum technology, from unhackable networks to earthquake sensors. But all these things depend on a major technological feat: being able to build and control systems of quantum particles, which are among the smallest objects in the universe.

That goal is now a step closer with the publication of a new method by University of Chicago scientists. Published April 28 in Nature, the paper shows how to bring multiple molecules at once into a single quantum state—one of the most important goals in quantum physics.

"People have been trying to do this for decades, so we’re very excited,” said senior author Cheng Chin, a Professor of Physics and the James Franck Instiute who said he has wanted to achieve this goal since he was a graduate student in the 1990s. “I hope this can open new fields in many-body quantum chemistry. There’s evidence that there are a lot of discoveries waiting out there.”

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