"Beyond snowflakes: Charting order and heterogeneity of nanomaterials"
This talk will summarize our recent efforts on studying the order and spatiotemporal heterogeneity of materials and addressing the associated science and technological questions of how to image them, quantify them, understand them, and engineer them for new properties, from the finest atomic scale to the particle assembly and composite scale. The enabling technological advancements are a suite of electron microscopy methods (e.g., liquid-phase TEM, electron tomography, 4D-STEM) and machine-learning based data-mining. I will show insights harnessed from these toolkits in various systems, from the fundamentals of nucleation and growth of nanoparticle lattices, geometry-controlled chiroptical and mechanical properties, to imaging and quantification on heterogeneity in morphology (for separation polymer membranes), in structural dynamics (for proteins), and in phase domains (for electrodes). Our long-term vision is to fully embrace new opportunities in the two sides of materials—order and heterogeneity—as demonstrated in the examples in this talk.
