Porous Heterostructures via Self-Assembly

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY A range of modern technologies relies on carefully layered materials, often assembled as two-dimensional structures. Adapting this strategy to make porous three-dimensional structures could improve control over interactions with light and magnetic fields while also helping reactions occur more efficiently at surfaces. A key knowledge gap concerns how to prepare such structures using scalable polymer-based processes. To develop a concept for this, the principal investigator and his research group at the University of South Carolina at Columbia study how designed polymers bind and arrange particles so that different materials form layers in a chosen order. With support from the Solid State and Materials Chemistry Program in NSF’s Materials Research Section A, the project establishes design rules for making these structures, so their atoms are arranged in ordered patterns. The work advances the national interest by expanding the scientific foundation for materials that could improve energy technologies, enable new ways to control light and magnetism, lead to new quantum materials, and speed up useful chemical reactions. The project also supports education, outreach, and workforce development by training students in materials synthesis, characterization, and data-based reasoning and by engaging students through nanomaterials outreach activities. TECHNICAL SUMMARY Inorganic heterostructures can enable emergent optical, electronic, magnetic, and catalytic functions, but established fabrication approaches often remain restricted to planar geometries or slow, costly processing. Porous three-dimensional forms increase accessible interface area, which can strengthen functional responses and accelerate catalytic surface reactions. This project develops the science needed to enable the direct self-assembly of crystalline, porous three-dimensional heterostructures using designed polymer structure-directing agents that preserve nanoparticle addition order through persistent polymer-nanoparticle interactions. This includes mechanistic investigations of how polymer and nanoparticle reactivity control persistent polymer-nanoparticle binding, and how polymer architecture controls dynamic polymer-nanoparticle interactions. The project also examines how nanoparticle phase (amorphous versus crystalline) and thermal processing time, ranging from hours to seconds, determine sintering and interface sharpness during crystallization. The broader impacts include graduate and undergraduate training at the interface of chemistry, nanoscience, and materials science. The research is integrated with education through a demonstration kit that is used as part of South Carolina SAXS Collaborative outreach activities and in an expanded graduate curriculum. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2603778 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Morgan Stefik | Institution: University of South Carolina at Columbia, COLUMBIA, SC | Award Amount: $458,879 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2603778 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2603778.html