July, 2015: Trapping vortices key to high-current superconductors. KIC member Séamus Davis and researchers from Cornell, Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories have found that irradiation can create nanometer-sized defects that trap swirling eddies in the flow of electrons, keeping them out of the way so more current can flow. They reported their discovery in the May 22 issue of the journal Science Advances.

June, 2015: Cornell chemist and KIC member Jiwoong Park has received a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award. The highly competitive program supports research teams working in more than one traditional science or engineering discipline to accelerate breakthroughs in basic research.

April, 2015: Cornell Chemistry Professor and KIC member Jiwoong Park has demonstrated a way to create a new kind of semiconductor thin film that retains its electrical properties even when it is just atoms thick. 

April 2015: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has named three Cornell faculty members, including KIC Director Paul McEuen, among its 197 new fellows for 2015.  The fellows are among "The world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic, business and philanthropic leaders."

March 2015: Postdoctoral fellow Tsevi Beatus, working with KIC member Itai Cohen, associate professor of physics, and John Guckenheimer, professor of mathematics, have discovered that flies stabilize themselves during flight using a control reflex that’s among the fastest in the animal kingdom. Their results were published March 11 in Royal Society Interface. 

March, 2015: KIC Member Itai Cohen and his research group have found that the square twist origami fold produces a distinct snapping between folded and unfolded states, like a light switch. By applying this to a gel polymer the size of a speck of dust, they are developing the foundation for origami-inspired materials and microscopic machines.

February, 2015: KIC Member Kyle Shen‘s group offers insight on how different “knobs” can change material properties in ways that were previously unexplored or misunderstood. Studying strontium iridate the researchers were able to flip it from behaving like metal to a semiconductor by applying spin-orbit interactions or changing molecular bond angles.

February 2015: A first-of-its-kind electron microscope, which will allow materials to be studied in their natural environments using an electron beam focused down to a subatomic spot, is coming to Cornell.  An NSF grant was awarded to an interdisciplinary team led by KIC member Lena F. Kourkoutis.

To better understand topological insulators (TIs) and why they weren’t living up to their potential Seamus Davis’s group at Cornell and Brookhaven National Lab studied them with their scanning tunneling microscope. What they found is the magnetic disorder at the surface was preventing the smooth flow of electrons.  Read their Feb 3 article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

January, 2015: The directors of three Kavli nanoscience institutes – Paul Alivisatos, Paul McEuen, and Nai-Cheng Yeh - discuss what makes the nanoscale so important, the field’s grand challenges, safety challenges, and their thoughts on funding, training and the future.