MIT.nano

Happy National Nanotechnology Day! October 9 is National Nanotechnology Day—the day that celebrates the potency of the world at the scale of one nanometer, 10-9 or one billionth of a meter. Every year, we celebrate 10/9 to shine a light on the potential of nanoscale discoveries and innovations to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing society today. This year, MIT.nano is unveiling the first in a collection of nanoStories — brief snippets that tell how our everyday experiences are shaped by what happens at the nanoscale. The book is designed for human explorers aged 11-100, who are curious about the way the world is put together. This collection was crafted by the imagination and excitement of students who took part in MIT.nano's nanostories workshop during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) 2021 to 2023! Read and download nanoStories: https://lnkd.in/eCXshbDa #NationalNanoDay #NationalNanotechnologyDay #NanoDay #NanoDay2025 #nanotechnology #nanoscience #nanoscale #nanoengineering #nanometers National Nanotechnology Initiative

START.nano recently hosted its inaugural PITCH.nano competition – an opportunity for early-stage startups to present their innovations to MIT and Boston’s hard-tech startup ecosystem. Twelve START.nano companies competed for the grand prize of nanoBucks to be used at MIT.nano’s facilities: In the areas of climate, energy, and materials: Addis Energy, Copernic Catalysts, Daqus Energy, VioNano Innovations, Active Surfaces, and Metal Fuels In life sciences: Acorn Genetics, Advanced Silicon Group, and BioSens8 In quantum and photonics: Quantum Network Technologies, nOhm Devices, and Brightlight Photonics   Congratulations to the grand prize winner, Active Surfaces, who is redefining solar with its flexible, ultra-thin, lightweight solar modules, and to the audience choice winner, Advanced Silicon Group, whose LightSense™ biosensor can simultaneously measure the concentration of many proteins and is fast, simple, inexpensive to use, lowering the barriers for protein sensing.   START.nano is MIT.nano’s hard-tech accelerator. The program provides participating startups with access to tools and other advantages that can help them create more well-developed prototypes, obtain validated data, set them on the path to success, and position them for the next stage of growth. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gVzmZqSm #startups #innovation #entrepreneurs #entrepreneurship #hardtech #hardtechnology #technology #energy #climate #materials #quantum #quantumcomputing #quantumscience #photonics #engineering #science

Today, palladium-based membranes are used at commercial scale to provide pure hydrogen for semiconductor manufacturing, food processing, and fertilizer production, among other applications in which the membranes operate at modest temperatures. If palladium membranes get much hotter than around 800 kelvins, they can break down. Now, Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers have developed a new palladium membrane that remains resilient at much higher temperatures. Rather than being made as a continuous film, as most membranes are, the new design is made from palladium that is deposited as “plugs” into the pores of an underlying supporting material. At high temperatures, the snug-fitting plugs remain stable and continue separating out hydrogen, rather than degrading as a surface film would. The thermally stable design opens opportunities for membranes to be used in hydrogen-fuel-generating technologies such as compact steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking — technologies that are designed to operate at much higher temperatures to produce hydrogen for zero-carbon-emitting fuel and electricity. “With further work on scaling and validating performance under realistic industrial feeds, the design could represent a promising route toward practical membranes for high-temperature hydrogen production,” says Lohyun Kim PhD ’24, a former graduate student in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE). This work utilized facilities at the MIT Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), the Mit Laboratory For Manufacturing And Productivity (LMP), and MIT.nano! Read the MIT News article: https://lnkd.in/ev3374kW Kim and his colleagues report details of the new membrane in a study appearing in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The study’s co-authors are Randall Field, director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI); former MIT Chemical Engineering (ChemE) graduate student Chun Man Chow PhD ’23; Rohit Karnik, the Jameel Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS); and Aaron Persad, a former MIT research scientist in mechanical engineering who is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. #mechanicalengineering #chemicalengineering #nanoscience #nanoscale #nanoengineering #hydrogen #semiconductors #manufacturing #agriculture #energy #fusion #engineering #science #technology

In the September edition of the MIT.nano Quarterly, learn about the new X-Ray diffractometer in our characterization facility, meet MIT.nano's new lab management system, read about the biomechanics of assimilating a new piano skill, and more!

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a method for optimizing materials recipes and planning experiments that incorporates information from diverse sources like insights from the literature, chemical compositions, microstructural images, and more. The approach is part of a new platform, named Copilot for Real-world Experimental Scientists (CRESt), that also uses robotic equipment for high-throughput materials testing, the results of which are fed back into large multimodal models to further optimize materials recipes. Human researchers can converse with the system in natural language, with no coding required, and the system makes its own observations and hypotheses along the way. Cameras and visual language models also allow the system to monitor experiments, detect issues, and suggest corrections. “In the field of AI for science, the key is designing new experiments,” says Ju Li, Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We use multimodal feedback — for example information from previous literature on how palladium behaved in fuel cells at this temperature, and human feedback — to complement experimental data and design new experiments. We also use robots to synthesize and characterize the material’s structure and to test performance.” Read the MIT News article: https://lnkd.in/e8Ri48GU Joining Li on the paper as first authors are PhD student Zhen Zhang, Zhichu Ren PhD ’24, PhD student Chia-Wei Hsu, and postdoc Weibin Chen. Their coauthors are MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim (Tim) Abate; Associate Professor Pulkit Agrawal; JR East Professor of Engineering Yang Shao-Horn; MIT.nano researcher Aubrey Penn; Zhang-Wei Hong PhD ’25, Hongbin Xu PhD ’25; Daniel Zheng PhD ’25; MIT graduate students Shuhan Miao and Hugh Smith; MIT postdocs Yimeng Huang, Weiyin Chen, Yungsheng Tian, Yifan Gao, and Yaoshen Niu; former MIT postdoc Sipei Li; and collaborators including Chi-Feng Lee, Yu-Cheng Shao, Hsiao-Tsu Wang, and Ying-Rui Lu. #AI #artificialintelligence #energy #engineering #materialsscience #nuclearscience #machinelearning #ML #technology

Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance. The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics. “People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT EECS) and MIT Department of Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance. This work was carried out, in part, at MIT.nano! Read the MIT News article: https://lnkd.in/eUwnd672 Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene (Jane) Park, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla Aynés, a postdoc in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague (UCT Prague). This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the U.S. Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. #transistors #semiconductors #electronics #electricalengineering #materialsscience #energy #spintronics #physics #computing #computerscience #technology #engineering #science #research

A team of researchers at the MIT Chemical Engineering (ChemE) Department have done a detailed analysis of the sounds emanating from lithium ion batteries, and has been able to correlate particular sound patterns with specific degradation processes taking place inside the cells. The new findings could provide the basis for relatively simple, totally passive and nondestructive devices that could continuously monitor the health of battery systems, for example in electric vehicles or grid-scale storage facilities, to provide ways of predicting useful operating lifetimes and forecasting failures before they occur. The work is reported in the journal Joule in a paper by MIT graduate students Yash Samantaray and Alexander Cohen, former MIT research scientist Daniel Cogswell PhD ’10, and Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and professor of mathematics Martin Bazant. The work was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano's facilities! Read the MIT News article: https://lnkd.in/edCdvJQ5 #batteries #energy #electronics #chemicalengineering #engineering #nanoscience #mathematics #electrochemistry #science #technology #research

Join us for the 2025 Nano Summit! https://lnkd.in/eVAiiERN The Nano Summit is MIT.nano's flagship conference, showcasing groundbreaking advancements in nanoscience and nanotechnology. The conference is ideal for researchers, industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and students interested in the latest developments in cutting-edge research, emerging technologies, and real-world applications. The 2025 conference will feature sessions that highlight the importance of #nanoscience and #nanotechnology across MIT's special initiatives. - Opening remarks: MIT President Sally Kornbluth - Future of health & life sciences: Chaired by Angela Koehler, Faculty Director, MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative; Associate Director, MIT Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; Professor in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering - Manufacturing at the nanoscale: Chaired by A. John Hart, Faculty Co-Director, Initiative for New Manufacturing; Department Head, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) - Nanosolutions for climate resilience: Chaired by Benedetto Marelli, Mission Director, MIT Climate Project; Associate Professor, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering - Picotalks about nano: A glimpse of ecosystems inside the lab: Chaired by Anna Osherov, Associate Director, Characterization.nano and Jorg Scholvin, Associate Director, Fab.nano - Honoring visionaries of nanoscience and nanotechnology: L. Rafael Reif, MIT President Emeritus and Professor of MIT EECS Hope to see you there on October 1, 2025! #nanoscale #nanoscience #nanotechnology #engineering #electricalengineering #mechanicalengineering #civilengineering #environmentalengineering #biologicalengineering #health #humanhealth #lifesciences #biology #climate #climatechange #climateresiliency #smartmanufacturing #science #technology #research

Ever since freezers were invented, the life sciences industry has been reliant on them. That’s because many patient samples, drug candidates, and other biologics must be stored and transported in powerful freezers or surrounded by dry ice to remain stable. The problem was on full display during the Covid-19 pandemic, when truckloads of vaccines had to be discarded because they had thawed during transport. Today, the stakes are even higher. Precision medicine, from CAR-T cell therapies to tumor DNA sequencing that guides cancer treatment, depends on pristine biological samples. Yet a single power outage, shipping delay, or equipment failure can destroy irreplaceable patient samples, setting back treatment by weeks or halting it entirely. In remote areas and developing nations, the lack of reliable cold storage effectively locks out entire populations from these life-saving advances. Cache DNA wants to set the industry free from freezers. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the company’s founders, former MIT postdoc James Banal and MIT Department of Biological Engineering Professor Mark Bathe, along with MIT Department of Chemistry Professor Jeremiah Johnson and two researchers in Johnson’s lab, have created a new way to store and preserve DNA molecules at room temperature. Now the company is building biomolecule preservation technologies that can be used in applications across health care, from routine blood tests and cancer screening to rare disease research and pandemic preparedness. Read more at MIT News: https://lnkd.in/evFT_NEi #health #humanhealth #biologicalengineering #chemistry #startups #DNA #nanotechnology #engineering #science #research

Join MIT.nano for our September seminar series! Mansour Shayegan, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University will present on a cascade of new even-denominator fractional quantum Hall states. Monday, September 29 at 3pm! Read the abstract and register: https://lnkd.in/eGDRjsK4 #engineering #electricalengineering #science #physics #quantumcomputing #technology