PNNL

A collaborative team from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington has successfully designed a bioinspired molecule that can direct gold atoms to form perfect five-pointed nanoscale stars. The work is an important step toward understanding and controlling metal nanoparticle shape and creating advanced materials with tunable properties.

Metallic nanomaterials have interesting optical properties, called plasmonic properties, said PNNL’s Chun-Long Chen, who is a PNNL senior research scientist, UW affiliate professor of chemical engineering and of chemistry, and a UW–PNNL Faculty Fellow. The study was published March 21, 2022, in the journal Angewandte Chemie. It is the product of growing collaborations between UW and PNNL in the materials synthesis space, including the joint initiatives Northwest Institute for Materials Physics, Chemistry, and Technology (NW IMPACT) and Materials Synthesis and Simulations Across Scales (MS3); and research funded by DOE through the Center for the Science of Synthesis Across Scales (CSSAS). These collaborations strongly benefit from the institutions’ dual appointment program.

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