The research of some University of New Orleans scientists is published in and highlighted on the cover of this week’s Journal of the American Chemical Society—the nation’s most prestigious chemistry journal. The researchers reported making very small materials with unique structures that could lead to technological advances in areas including computers, medicine and energy.
The UNO researchers developed methods for the fabrication of nanoscale peapod structures—peapods with diameters about 5,000 times smaller than a human hair. By combining chains of small round magnetic crystals and very thin metal oxide sheets only a few atoms thick, the chemists were able to get the sheets to curl around and encase the magnetic chains to form peapod-like structures. Such materials are significant because they demonstrate not only the ability to make such small structures but they could lead to technological advances in various areas such as computer memory, medical imaging and energy production.
The work was done by Yuan Yao, Girija Chaubey and John Wiley. Wiley is a university research professor of chemistry and the associate director of UNO’s Advanced Materials Research Institute. He has compiled nearly 100 scientific publications and attracted more than $13 million in federal and state funding to UNO. Chaubey was a postdoctoral associate in Wiley’s group who now works as a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute’s Advanced Technology Program. Yao is a doctoral graduate student in her last semester at UNO. Her research has involved the fabrication of various nanostructures that contain atomically thin sheets and very small crystals.
The research was supported by the Louisiana Board of Regents Post-Katrina Support Fund Initiative.