Researchers from Brown University and the University of Michigan have achieved something that scientists had only imagined until now. By carefully arranging tiny particles of silver into custom-built structures, they created and stabilized a previously elusive state of matter that had existed only in theoretical models.
The work, published in Science, captures an intermediate structural state that appears during a transformation between two common crystal arrangements found in metals. In addition to revealing new details about how these transformations occur, the newly created material displays unusual optical behavior that could eventually be useful for quantum computing and other quantum information technologies.
More broadly, the research demonstrates a new strategy for designing materials from the bottom up by assembling specially engineered nanoparticles into entirely new structures with customized properties.
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