The newly opened centre for nanostructure imaging, at the department of physics, could help U of T colleagues across different disciplines collaborate more closely.
Its two electron microscopes can visualize structures hundreds of thousands of times smaller than a human hair, the facility is used by chemists to design and build nanostructured materials. These have features on the scale of one-billionth of a metre.
Making this type of structures is important, said Dr. Ian Manners, of the department of chemistry, because of the new applications that could result from them. “You can generate new functions by making structures that small. You can divide them all up and make dots and lines on the nano-scale, generating new properties,” said Manners.
“This is an area where there has been a lot of investigation. The focus now is on applications.”
Manners, a leader in the field of inorganic polymer chemistry, is seeking new ways to synthesize polymers-large molecules made up of smaller molecules linked together in a regular pattern. Inorganic means using elements other than carbon, and these types of polymers can take on properties that make them useful for high-tech applications, such as electronics.
For instance, metal-based polymers can conduct electricity. This allows them to expand and contract, or to change colour in the presence of an electrical stimulus. Manners’ research could lead to a wide variety of applications, including novel photoconductors, protective coatings and sensors.
Another researcher at the centre, Dr. Andrei Yudin, an organic chemist, takes a different tack to materials chemistry. He embeds catalysts-small amounts of inert compounds designed to increase the rate of a desired chemical reaction-onto thin polymer films, in order to study new organic methods for making biologically active small molecules.
“The way we look at material sciences is mainly from the standpoint of new small molecules that recognize specific proteins,” said Yudin. He is working on ways to synthesize compounds that could provide a new cure for that terrible tropical disease.
