ABSTRACT Proposal No: 9871782 Proposal Type: Nanotechnology Initiative Principal Investigator: Mark T. Tuominen Affiliation: University of Massachusetts at Amherst This grant is awarded through the Separations and Purification Processes Program of the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems. It is jointly funded through the Division of Chemical and Transport Systems, the Division of Design Manufacturing and Industrial Innovation, and the Division of Materials Research. The research will seek to develop simple, robust routes to generate functional nanoscopic structures utilizing thin films of block copolymers as templates. A key element in the proposed research is the ability to remove one of the blocks in an easy and quantitative manner to generate a porous structure with well-defined pore size and shape. The project combines polymer chemistry and chemicals processing with the physics of ultra small scale devices to produce functional nanostructures. A range of potential applications exist for these materials, including membranes with well defined nanopores, quantum wires with giant magnetoresistance, and organized quantum dot structures.
