Crystalline porous materials have many applications, including catalysis and separations. Identifying suitable materials for a given application can be achieved by screening material databases. Such a screening requires automated high-throughput analysis tools that characterize and represent pore landscapes with descriptors, which can be compared using similarity measures in order to select, gr...

We report a detailed study of the effects that crystalline disorder has on the magnetic relaxation and quantum tunneling of Mn12 benzoate clusters. Thanks to the absence of interstitial molecules in the crystal structure of this molecular compound, we have been able to isolate the influence of long-range crystalline disorder. For this, we compare results obtained under two extreme situations: a...

Phase-change materials undergo rapid and reversible crystalline-to-amorphous structural transformation and are being used for nonvolatile memory devices. However, the transformation mechanism remains poorly understood. We have studied the effect of electrical pulses on the crystalline-to-amorphous phase change in a single-crystalline Ge(2)Sb(2)Te(5) (GST) nanowire memory device by in situ trans...

Breathing dust that contains respirable crystalline silica can lead to silicosis, a deadly lung disease. Respirable dust is that fraction of the aerosol that is small enough to reach the deeper, gas-exchange regions of the lungs. No effective treatment exists for silicosis, but it can be prevented by controlling workers’ exposures to dust containing crystalline silica. Exposure to crystalline s...

Long-range order and phase transitions in two-dimensional (2D) systems-such as magnetism, superconductivity, and crystallinity-have been important research topics for decades. The issue of 2D crystalline order has reemerged recently, with the development of exfoliated atomic crystals. Understanding the dimensional limit of crystalline phases, with different types of bonding and synthetic techni...

Recent theoretical progress in understanding the effect of silver nanoparticles on photo-induced orientation of liquid crystalline polymer was reviewed. The observed enhancement of photo-induced rate results from the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of silver nanoparticles. And the observed reducing phenomena are attributed to the interaction between materials and silver nanoparticles. And then ...

A textbook has been prepared for an entry level Materials Science and Engineering graduate course on structure and bonding in crystalline materials. The course is intended to serve as a foundation for other graduate courses by providing techniques to understand crystal structures and the cohesive forces that stabilize them. The intrinsically connected topics of structure and bonding are present...

A novel mechanism of photo-orientation of azobenzene-containing liquid-crystalline materials is proposed. This mechanism is based on the notion of photochemically induced domain rearrangement driven by destabilization of liquid-crystalline phase in light absorbing domains due to photochemical formation of non-mesogenic cis-azobenzene moieties. The experimental evidence of photoinduced movement ...

New phosphorescent and room-temperature liquid-crystalline materials were obtained by combining dicyanometallate anions with dicationic bisamidinium based tectons bearing four peripheral lipophilic pyrogallate moieties.

We describe a new supramolecular approach combining host-guest and electrostatic interactions to design hybrid materials containing polyanionic bulky inorganic compounds and showing liquid crystalline properties.