Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University, and Stony Brook University have developed a universal method for producing a wide variety of designed metallic and semiconductor 3D nanostructures—the potential base materials for next-generation semiconductor devices, neuromorphic computing, and advanced energy applications.
The new method, which uses a "hacked" form of DNA that instructs molecules to organize themselves into targeted 3D patterns, is the first of its kind to produce robust nanostructures from multiple material classes. The study was published in Science Advances.
"We have been using DNA to program nanoscale materials for more than a decade," said corresponding author Oleg Gang, a professor of chemical engineering and of applied physics and materials science at Columbia Engineering and leader of the Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). CFN is a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven Lab.
"Now, by building on previous achievements, we have developed a method for converting these DNA-based structures into many types of functional inorganic 3D nano-architectures, and this opens tremendous opportunities for 3D nanoscale manufacturing."
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