By Jamie Oberdick
From growing perfect crystals to testing materials in real-world conditions, Penn State’s advanced lab tools are making scientific breakthroughs possible
Great ideas and brilliant researchers are essential for discovery—but so is having the right equipment. At Penn State, scientists are pushing the boundaries of materials science thanks to new, state-of-the-art tools that let them explore questions they couldn’t answer before.
By Ashley WennersHerron
Silicon is king in the semiconductor technology that underpins smartphones, computers, electric vehicles and more, but its crown may be slipping, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State. In a world first, they used two-dimensional (2D) materials, which are only an atom thick and retain their properties at that scale, unlike silicon, to develop a computer capable of simple operations.
By Jamie Oberdick and Ashley WennersHerron
Newly achieved precise control over light emitted from incredibly tiny sources, a few nanometers in size, embedded in two-dimensional (2D) materials could lead to remarkably high-resolution monitors and advances in ultra-fast quantum computing, according to an international team led by researchers at Penn State and Université Paris-Saclay.
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N-258 Millennium Science Complex
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Congratulations to Maria Hilse who received the 2024 Rustum and Della Roy Innovation in Materials Research Award for Research Faculty. Hilse’s research focus is on the synthesis and characterization of unique materials that are extremely thin, such as one- and two-dimensional nanostructures, films and heterostructures using MBE. This method works in conditions similar to the vacuum of outer space and allows precise control over these ultra-thin films' thickness.
By Jamie Oberdick
The microelectronics industry is nearing a tipping point. The silicon chips at the heart of everyday electronic devices are running into performance limits, raising the need for new materials and technologies to continue making faster, more efficient devices.
Stephanie Law was selected as a 2024 fellow by AVS “For contributions to the molecular beam epitaxy of III-V materials and topological insulators for applications in mid-infrared and THz plasmonic and metamaterial devices”. 
Nitin Samarth, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Physics, has been selected to receive the American Physical Society’s 2024 David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics. The award recognizes an outstanding contributor to the field of materials physics who is notable for high quality research, review articles, and lecturing.