Nanoscience with X-rays – Eric Isaacs

Date: Thu. April 21st, 2005, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

Future nanoscience and nanotechnologies, from quantum computation to light harvesting for energy and advanced medical therapies, will be based on new nanoscale materials and materials architectures that include quantum dots, photonic crystals, laterally confined inorganic and organic thin films and single molecules. In this talk, I will highlight recent advances at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory in the synthesis, self-assembly and characterization of nanostructured materials. I will emphasize how advanced x-ray techniques can address outstanding questions in nanoscale structure, dynamics and properties. Several recent examples include the x-ray visualization of the evolution of antiferromagnetic domain walls on the sub-micron scale in chromium, a ‘simple’ magnet that exhibits quantum critical behavior and the electronic and surface structure of 2 nm semiconductor nanoparticle-DNA composites that exhibit strong charge separation and have the potential for future in-vivo gene therapies.