Graduate student Long Yang, in collaboration with Dr. Pavol Juhas (Brookhaven National Laboratory), Dr. Maxwell Terban (Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research), and Dr. Matthew Tucker (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) recently had a paper accepted in the journal Acta Crystallographica Section A that establishes a new data-mining methodology on finding candidate structures from structural… Read More Structure-mining: An Automated Tool to Find Candidate Structures

Graduate student Long Yang, in collaboration with the group of Prof. Stephen O’Brien at The City College of New York recently had a paper accepted in the journal Chemistry of Materials that describes the multiferroic behavior in the iron doped barium titanate nanocrystals. (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.chemmater.8b04447) Materials that exhibit both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic (ferroic) properties and their… Read More Stoichiometric Control Over Ferroic Behavior in Iron Doped Barium Titanate Nanocrystals

Despite the ubiquitous importance of nanoparticles in the modern scientific and technological materials landscape, it is notoriously difficult to obtain good information about how the atomic bonding in these systems changes as a function of nanoparticle size. Such information is critical to understand properties such as catalytic activity or optical response of nanoparticles. A team… Read More Examining the size-dependent lattice dynamics of atomically precise CdSe quantum dots

Congratulations to the Billinge Group’s post-post doc, now assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, Kirsten Jensen, for her recent Nature Communications paper which determined the polymorphic structural nature of a gold based nano-particle using the Pair distribution function (PDF) method. This is exceptional because these nano particles are ultra-small, and have unique… Read More Solving the Nano-structure Problem in Gold Nanoparticles Using PDF.

It is not often that a member gets direct recognition from the president of a nation. Zurab was recently awarded the Georgian Order of Honor for his work elucidating the microscopic properties of high-temperature superconductors while at the Laboratory for Muon Spectroscopy (LMU). Such impressive work also earned Zurab the internationally competitive Tsinandali Award in… Read More Congratulations to group Post-doc Zurab Guguchia.

Deblurring our View of Atomic Arrangements in Complex Materials Novel materials will impact our society in new and exceptional ways. Imagine, for instance, a material that is transparent with an exceptionally low thermal conductivity: it could be used as a window that completely blocks radiated heat from sunlight during summer and traps all the heat… Read More NSF funded project takes off at Columbia: DMREF: Deblurring our View of Atomic Arrangements in Complex Materials for Advanced Technologies

The group has been featured in Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Top-10 Science Successes of 2016 for contributions in advanced data analytics. PDF analysis of the x-ray scattering data revealed two polymorphs of gold-144 nanoparticles including a structure never seen before. The discovery shines the light on the atomic arrangement within these gold nanoparticles and paves the… Read More The Billinge Group has one of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Top-10 Science Successes of 2016

Thanks to Organizer Zurab Guguchia, ably helped by Soham Banerjee and Max Terban, the second “Nanostructure in the City” took place on Weds 26th October 2016 in the Mudd Building at Columbia University.  It featured 12 excellent talks on a broad range of topics from structure property relationships of quantum-dot nanoparticles, to strongly correlated electron… Read More Nanostructure in the City Symposium

As the Billinge group looks forward to ACA 2016, we look back on the 2015 meeting! 1) Our very own, Simon Billinge and Pavol Juhas gave an exciting session on PDF application in pharmaceuticals. Specifically, how to use PDF analysis to determine solid-state structures of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), for quality control, stability studies and… Read More American Crystallography Association (ACA) 2016!