Light-based ‘tractor beam’ assembles materials at the nanoscale

A team led by NanoES faculty member Peter Pauzauskie, a professor of materials science and engineering, has developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.

Researchers take a bottom-up approach to synthesizing microscopic diamonds for bioimaging, quantum computing

NanoES faculty member Peter Pauzauskie and his team discovered that they can use extremely high pressure and temperature to introduce other elements into nanodiamonds, making them potentially useful in cell and tissue imaging, as well as quantum communications and quantum sensing. This work was done in collaboration with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and published in Science Advances on May 3.