Chemists create new quasicrystal material from nanoparticle building blocks. 

“Single-component quasicrystal lattices have been predicted mathematically and in computer simulations, but hadn’t been demonstrated before this,” said Ou Chen, an assistant professor of chemistry at Brown and the paper’s senior author. “It’s a fundamentally new type of quasicrystal, and we’ve been able to figure out the rules for making it, which will be useful in the continued study of quasicrystal structures.”

Daniel Choi, Chemical Physics Concentrator in the Class of 2020, has been featured on Brown's homepage as a "Student Focus." Daniel received an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA) for research in Prof. Brenda Rubenstein's Group.

This year the Department of Chemistry welcomed 14 Ph.D. students from diverse backgrounds and three different countries.  We welcomed them all on August 29, and we are very excited they chose to embark on their graduate career in the Department of Chemistry at Brown. We wish them all the best in their academic endeavors. 

Researchers from Brown University have assembled complex macroscale superstructures from pyramid-shaped nanoparticle building blocks. The research, described in the journal Nature, demonstrates a promising new way to bring the useful properties of nanoparticles to macroscale materials and devices.