The Division of Chemistry supports Sassan Sheikholeslami of Stanford University as an American Competitiveness in Chemistry Fellow. Dr. Sheikholeslami will work on synthesizing new kinds of materials with unusual physical properties (e.g. materials with negative refractive index) using a bottom-up approach. Materials will be synthesized using self-assembly of metal nanoparticles with a DNA scaffolding. The PI will collaborate with scientists at the Molecular Foundry of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop efficient, inexpensive methods for making interesting 'metamaterials'. For his plan for broadening participation, Dr. Sheikholeslami will collaborate with a San Francisco Bay Area artist to develop an exhibition on nanoscience to help educate the public about this important area of technology.
Research like that of Dr. Sheikholeslami is aimed at developing new materials with interesting and unusual properties. The specific materials that Dr. Sheikholeslami is concentrating on ('metamaterials') have remarkable optical properties, unlike any other common optical materials. Similar materials have been created in the laboratory with elaborate and expensive lithographic methods. Dr. Sheikholeslami is developing methods that will create these materials in a flask, at a much lower cost. Work like this enables scientists to develop materials that may lead to revolutionary technology that can have impacts in optics, solar energy, and defense. The efforts at broadening participation being pursued by Dr. Sheikholeslami are aimed at giving a broad cross section of the public exposure to an important area of the chemical sciences.
The research supported by this award focused on developing chemical methods to produce optical metamaterials, capable of interacting with light in novel ways. Metamaterials are an exciting new field merging nanotechnology and optics to create materials with properties not found in nature. The field gained a lot of interest in the later 1990's when some researchers showed that properly designed materials could exhibit negative refraction of light, opening open entire new possiblities for applications. For example, optical metamaterials can guide light around objects like an invisibiity cloak, and also be used to make computer chips that use light instead of electricity. However, most metamaterials that have been made require expensive nanofabrication techniques that do not easily scale-up to making these materials in kilogram quantity. Our research project developed a new type of chemical method based on the self-assembly and recognition of proteins to grow a liquid metamaterial. We developed techniques to specifically form these plasmonic metamaterials in large quantities and then developed an optical instrument to measure there interactions with light. We showed that metamaterial that we created has a strong interaction with the magnetic field of light and thus can bend light in a programmable way based on the underlying structure of the material. Our work also developed computer tools to simulate the flow of light through these materials. Our work was an important first step towards creating scalable ways to manfacture optical metamaterials. These materials show great promise for many important emerging technologies, especially optical computing.
