First-Principles Based Control of Multi-Scale Meta-Material Assembly Processes

Associate Professor Benjamin Shapiro (BioE/ISR) is a principal investigator on a new National Science Foundation grant to develop tools that could one day mass-produce revolutionary materials for future technologies such as optical computing, energy harvesting, sub-diffraction limit imaging and invisibility cloaking. “First-Principles Based Control of Multi-Scale Meta-Material Assembly Processes,” is a four-year, $1.6 M Collaborative Research Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) Type II grant that focuses on precisely controlling ensembles of nanoparticles to create defect-free crystals for optoelectronic metamaterials, in a way that has the potential to scale up to fabrication. Such a development could have a similar revolutionary effect as the creation of single crystal silicon, which enabled integrated circuits and modern computing.