10-07/08 :: July/August 2010

nanotimes News in Brief

most node points. This results in a new magnetic order, which while violating the spin ice rules, is still surprising and fascinating in its regularity. © Hartmut Zabel / Ruhr- University

Alexandra Schumann, Björn Sothmann, Philipp Szary, and Hartmut Zabel: Charge ordering of magnetic di- poles in artificial honeycomb lattices, In: Applied Phy- sics Letters, Vol. 97(2010), Issue 2, July 12, 2010, Article 022509, DOI:10.1063/1.3463482: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3463482

Scientists from the University of Toronto, Univer- sity of North Carolina, and Harvard University, report in Science Magazine on the marked similari- ty between the self-assembly of metal nanoparti- cles and reaction-controlled step-growth polyme- rization. The nanoparticles act as multifunctional monomer units, which form reversible, noncovalent bonds at specific bond angles and organize them- selves into a colloidal polymer. They show that the kinetics and statistics of step-growth polymerization enable a quantitative prediction of the architec- ture of linear, branched, and cyclic self-assembled nanostructures; their aggregation numbers and size distribution; and the formation of structural isomers.

Kun Liu, Zhihong Nie, Nana Zhao, Wei Li, Michael Rubin- stein, Eugenia Kumacheva: Step-Growth Polymerization of Inorganic Nanoparticles, In: Science, Vol. 329(2010), No. 5988, July 09, 2010, Pages 197-200, DOI:10.1126/ science.1189457:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1189457

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), located in Richland, Washington, USA, is

http://www.smt.zeiss.com http://www.pnl.gov/

bringing an ORION®

65

PLUS instrument into the U.S.

Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory as a resource. And, in Tsu- kuba, Japan, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has selected an ORION®

PLUS for their new Nanode-

vice Innovation Research Center. These installations provide further evidence of a growing reliance on helium-ion microscopy for the most demanding re- search in materials, life science and semiconductor applications.

PNNL has become the first US national lab to acquire a ZEISS ORION®

PLUS helium-ion micro-

scope. One of the Department of Energy‘s (DOE‘s) ten national laboratories, managed by DOE‘s Office of Science, PNNL offers an open, collaborative environment for scientific discovery to researchers around the world.

“We are very excited to be adding a helium-ion microscope to our arsenal of leading-edge scientific instruments,” said Shuttha Shutthanadan, scientist at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a national scientific user facility located at PNNL. “Basically, helium-ion microscopy improves our vision at the nanoscale, allowing us to see things we could never see before. Having access to an instrument that provides world-record spatial reso- lution imaging, plus high image contrast and large depth of field will enable our users to accelerate their innovations.”