RII Track-4: Designing Solution-Processed Hybrid Metamaterials via DNA Self-Assembly

非技术说明随着制造占地面积更小但运行速度更快的设备的需求不断增加，开发具有前所未有的性能的材料至关重要。这些对性能的要求与开发廉价且可扩展的纳米制造技术相联系，以便将这些先进材料快速部署到新能源、通信和医疗技术中。超材料是一类在自然界中不存在的材料，它可以具有由其周期性、有组织的结构而不是其单个单元的固有材料性质所决定的奇异性质。然而，制造超材料往往是昂贵和耗时的，因此需要复杂的工具来制造高精度的周期性纳米结构阵列。在这个项目中，首席研究员将与布鲁克海文国家实验室的专家合作，开发一种低成本的解决方案-工艺技术来制造三维超材料(BNL)。其目标是使用自组装，即将复杂结构组装在一起的自然过程，将不同纳米结构的亚单位排列成三维超材料，提供对改变这一过程的环境因素的实时洞察。这个高度跨学科的项目提供了光子学、纳米制造和高分辨率显微镜领域的教育和培训机会，并使来自阿拉巴马州的研究生和本科生能够在BNL进行研究。如果成功，该项目将提供一种大规模创造超材料的战略，与材料基因组计划的愿景保持一致，即用一半的时间和一小部分的成本发现、制造和部署先进的材料。技术描述超材料的发展为研究人员提供了一种前所未有的方法来实现对光-物质相互作用的控制，导致奇异的光学效应，如隐形、超透镜和增强的纠缠光子产生。将超材料整合到能源收集和传感技术中的关键一步是开发低成本、能够适应大规模制造的纳米制造方法。该项目旨在开发一种DNA引导的溶液加工策略来制备杂化三维超材料。不同纳米结构的精确组装是通过选择性地在它们的表面涂上DNA来引入定向键合来实现的，这种定向键合可以被编程为在所需的方向上自组装。这使得不同形状(球体、立方体或八面体)和材料(金属和电介质)的高质量晶体纳米结构可以形成纳米结构的三维周期性排列。由于单个纳米结构或单元细胞的固有性质是可以控制的，这为理解复杂的纳米结构组装如何引起包括非线性效应在内的新兴光学现象提供了一个独特的平台。该项目的一个关键部分是在微流控反应器中进行原位线性和非线性光学实验，该反应器可以控制纳米结构组装微环境。通过调整微环境，我们将研究各种电磁模式是如何耦合的，以及如何相互调整这些不同的机制。此外，我们将使用全场三维时域有限差分电磁求解器来模拟这些混合超材料系统的光学性质。如果成功，该项目将提供一条使用溶液处理方法制造具有奇异线性和/或非线性特性的超材料的途径，这种方法具有设计灵活性、高通量以及整合到墨水状或卷筒打印中的潜力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Nontechnical DescriptionWith increasing demands to build devices that have a smaller footprint but operate at greater speeds, it is critical to develop materials with never-before-seen properties. These demands in performance are tied with developing nanofabrication techniques that are cheap and scalable in order to rapidly deploy these advanced materials into novel energy, communication and medical technologies. Metamaterial, a class of material that does not occur in nature, can possess exotic properties as determined by their periodic, organized structures rather than the intrinsic material properties of their individual units. However, fabricating metamaterials is often costly and time-consuming, thus requiring sophisticated tools to create periodic arrays of nanostructures with high precision. In this project, the Principal Investigator will partner with experts at Brookhaven National Laboratory to develop a low-cost solution-process technique to fabricate three-dimensional metamaterial (BNL). The goal is to use self-assembly, the natural process by which complex structures are put together, to arrange subunits of different nanostructures into a three-dimensional metamaterial, providing real-time insights on the environmental factors that modify this process. This highly interdisciplinary project provides education and training opportunities in the fields of photonics, nanofabrication and high-resolution microscopy, and enables graduate and undergraduate students from Alabama to conduct research at BNL. If successful, this project will offer a strategy to create metamaterial on a large scale, aligning with the Materials Genome Initiative's vision to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials in half the time and at a fraction of the cost.Technical DescriptionThe development of metamaterials has provided researchers an unpreceded way to achieve control over light-matter interaction, leading to exotic optical effects such as cloaking, superlensing and enhanced entangled photon generation. A critical step towards integrating metamaterials into energy-harvesting and sensing technologies is to develop nanofabrication methods that are low-cost and can be adapted for large-scale manufacturing. This project aims to develop a DNA-guided solution-processed strategy to fabricate hybrid three-dimensional metamaterials. The precise assembly of dissimilar nanostructures is achieved by selectively coating their surfaces with DNA to introduce directional bonding that can be programmed to self-assemble in a desired orientation. This allows high-quality crystalline nanostructures of different shapes (spheres, cubes or octahedrons) and materials (metal and dielectrics) to form into three-dimensional periodic arrangements of nanostructures. Since the intrinsic properties of an individual nanostructure or unit cell can be controlled, this provides a unique platform to understand how complex nanostructure assembly give rise to emerging optical phenomena, including nonlinear effects. A key part of this project is in situ linear and nonlinear optical experiments performed in a microfluidic reactor that can control the nanostructure-assembly microenvironment. By tuning the microenvironment, we will study how various electromagnetic modes couple and how to tune these various mechanisms with respect to each other. Furthermore, we will use full-field three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain electromagnetic solvers to model the optical properties of these hybrid metamaterial systems. If successful, the project will provide a route to fabricating metamaterials with exotic linear and/or nonlinear properties using solution-processed methods, which offer several advantages such as design flexibility, high-throughput, and the potentials for integration into ink-like or roll-to-roll printing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.