Nanoscience and Advanced Materials

Upward band gap bowing and negative mixing enthalpy in multi-component cubic halide perovskite alloys

Daniel Morton — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:14:59 +0000

Upward band gap bowing and negative mixing enthalpy in multi-component cubic halide perovskite alloys Daniel Morton Wed, 02/25/2026 - 11:14

PHYSICAL REVIEW MATERIALS, 2026, 10, 025405

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2026 Three Minute Thesis Finalists

Daniel Morton — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:57:33 +0000

2026 Three Minute Thesis Finalists Daniel Morton Tue, 02/24/2026 - 13:57

Daniel Morton

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder 3MT Competition

2026 3MT Announcement

Recording of 2026 3MT Final

Meet 3MT Finalist Ben Hammel

Ben Hammel, a graduate student in the Dukovic Group, was a finalist in the 2026 �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Three Minute Thesis Competition. We caught up with Ben to find out more about the whole 3MT process.

What is 3MT?

3MT stands for Three-Minute Thesis, which was a competition started at the University of Queensland. I think the history behind it is that they were going through droughts in Australia and everyone had these three-minute egg timers in their showers to limit water usage. Someone had this idea of maybe this was a good challenge for condensing/communicating your research: how well can you present your thesis in three minutes?

What did you have to do?

I came into this wanting to learn how to clearly describe my research. The rubric is really about explaining your science. They look at clarity, your enthusiasm, and about the slide and presentation. But they also look at can you describe the motivation of your research? Can you describe the design of your research? Can you describe the conclusions and societal impact of your work? So it is about science communication, with a strong grounding in the scientific aspects. Going through this process and thinking through these things has given me a better understanding of my own science.

Can you describe your research in five words?

Using microscope to look at nanocrystals. Six, that is ok, right?

What drew you to do the 3MT?

I wanted to improve my scientific communication skills, and I felt like there was something really cool about my research that I wanted to share. It is this simple idea that we need to look at nanocrystals to understand how they work. I get to use this amazing microscope to do just that!

What was the best part of the 3MT program?

The best part was definitely the cohort of talks. In the final competition folks got to see eleven presentations from across the graduate school, and that was awesome, but in the preliminary round there were more than 25. There were so many great talks from so many parts of the school that I got to see. It was really fun. You get to see in an hour so much condensed scientific knowledge. That was definitely the best part.

What was the worst/hardest part of the 3MT program?

The hardest part was talking about the science. It is so easy for me to say “we study these nanocrystals, and they’re cool, and I use this microscope”, but when people really ask me about what are the scientific questions you have and what are the experiments you run to answer them? And how are you going to engineer nanocrystals? It’s difficult to answer these kinds of technical questions in an accessible way.

How do you think your experience in 3MT will help you in the future?

Oh, it’s already helping me! Just in the way I talk to people and explain things. I feel like it has made me intellectually stronger and I am already noticing that it helps me communicate more clearly and think about my research in different ways.

What would you say to a grad student considering doing 3MT in the future?

Strongly recommend. It will take up a decent amount of your time, but it is definitely worth it. Don’t be afraid to tackle hard scientific concepts! One thing I regret not doing more of is really trying hard to tackle quantum mechanics in my talk. The properties of quantum dots are derived from quantum mechanics and I was scared to try to explain that, and I made my explanation totally classical. I was describing electricity flowing through crystals, but I think that people were hungry to learn more about the deeper science, and I should have given it a shot, at least to practice it and see if I could do it.

February 2026

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Tuning Thermal Stability through Dopant Size in Chemically Doped DPP–Thiophene Polymers

Daniel Morton — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:17:09 +0000

Tuning Thermal Stability through Dopant Size in Chemically Doped DPP–Thiophene Polymers Daniel Morton Fri, 02/20/2026 - 11:17

CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS, 2026, 38, 5, 2293-2304

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Structural and Compositional Evolution of Colloidal In1–xGaxP1–yAsy Nanocrystals during Cation Exchange Revealed by Electron Microscopy

Daniel Morton — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:11:18 +0000

Structural and Compositional Evolution of Colloidal In1–xGaxP1–yAsy Nanocrystals during Cation Exchange Revealed by Electron Microscopy Daniel Morton Fri, 02/13/2026 - 11:11

ACS NANO, 2026, 20, 7, 5506-5517

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High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System

Daniel Morton — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 18:08:30 +0000

High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System Daniel Morton Sun, 02/08/2026 - 11:08

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY, 2026, 148, 6, 6412-6421

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Reconfigurable self-assembly of porous anisotropic colloids in nematic liquid crystals

Daniel Morton — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:57:00 +0000

Reconfigurable self-assembly of porous anisotropic colloids in nematic liquid crystals Daniel Morton Mon, 02/02/2026 - 10:57

MATTER, 2026, 102563

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Excitonic frontiers

Daniel Morton — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:54:58 +0000

Excitonic frontiers Daniel Morton Thu, 01/29/2026 - 10:54

PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS A, 2026, 384, 2313, 20220273

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The case of the vanishing seeds: How curiosity-driven research is future-proofing “Smart Windows”

Daniel Morton — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:02:14 +0000

The case of the vanishing seeds: How curiosity-driven research is future-proofing “Smart Windows” Daniel Morton Tue, 01/27/2026 - 10:02

Daniel Morton

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Have you ever walked into a room on a glorious Colorado summer day and felt the heat radiating through the glass?

We usually solve this by cranking up the air conditioning or closing the blinds, losing our mountain view in the process. But what if the window itself could think? A team led by Mike McGehee, a Fellow at RASEI, describes research that improves the robustness of such a device.

For years researchers have been working on “smart windows”, devices that could “sense” the conditions outside and “react” to them. This investigation centers around a promising technology called Reversible Metal Electrodeposition (RME). The technical details of this process are complex, but you can understand the concept by thinking of it as a reversible coat of paint. At the flip of a switch, a thin layer of metal, in this case silver, spreads across the glass to form a layer that tints it, blocking out the heat and the glare. Flip the switch again and the silver dissolves back into a clear liquid, making the window transparent.

Buildings are responsible for consuming around 40% of all generated energy globally, much of which is expended in regulating the temperature, heating and cooling the building interior. Installing smart windows that can react to the environmental conditions could provide a very effective mechanism to reduce energy use and slash energy bills by automatically managing how much heat enters a room. It has been estimated that just by controlling the amount of sunlight that is let into a building through a window, we could cut energy bills by up to as much as 20%.

However, there have been a number of challenges to overcome in order to take this initial discovery from the lab to a product that can be deployed for use in buildings. One challenge is that early versions of these windows started out fast but grew “lazy” over time. After a few thousand uses the tinting / de-tinting process slowed, taking almost four times longer than it did on day one.

This is where the researchers undertook some detailed investigations to identify what was going on, and what could be done to fix it. A collaboration between the McGehee group (at the �鶹��Ѱ��) and the Barile Group (at the University of Nevada) set out to find out exactly what was happening. The team decided to look closer, using a combination of high-powered x-rays and electrochemical tests. The windows were using tiny “seeds” of platinum to help the silver grow on the glass. Platinum is recognized for being tough and non-reactive, and so should be perfect as a nucleation point for the silver. Using these advanced techniques the team explored exactly what was happening to the platinum seeds during the clearing phase, when the silver “paint” is stripped away.

To their surprise, the platinum was not as tough as they initially thought. In the special liquid environment needed for the windows, the platinum seeds were actually dissolving and washing away when the window was switched to clear. As the number of seeds dropped, the silver had fewer locations to grow from, which was the cause behind the window tinting slowing.

This led the team to ask the question “What can we do to make the seeds more resilient?”, which led them to use gold in place of platinum. While gold and platinum are both precious metals, in water, which is the solvent used inside the window panels, gold is more stable and less susceptible to decomposition and dissolving. When they swapped the platinum seeds for gold ones, the results were immediate. Even after 7,500 cycles, the equivalent of years of daily use, the windows transitioned just as fast as the first time they were used.

These gold-based windows provide an exciting range of opportunities. Not only because of their improved stability over many thousands of cycles, but also because they can express multiple colors by varying the voltage, a feature of the size of the gold particles. This presents opportunities for their use in displays and communications devices. This technology offers a better, smarter window that could passively save significant amounts of energy if deployed in commercial and residential buildings. This work shows how the impact of making fundamental chemical changes can unlock the potential of new technologies.

January 2026

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Influence of Ligand Exchange on Single Particle Properties of Cesium Lead Bromide Quantum Dots

Daniel Morton — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:16:48 +0000

Influence of Ligand Exchange on Single Particle Properties of Cesium Lead Bromide Quantum Dots Daniel Morton Tue, 01/20/2026 - 14:16

CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS, 2026, 38, 3, 1074-1083

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Origins of anisotropic linear magnetoresistance with isotropic mobility in Cd3As2 films on GaAs[110]

Daniel Morton — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:20:48 +0000

Origins of anisotropic linear magnetoresistance with isotropic mobility in Cd3As2 films on GaAs[110] Daniel Morton Fri, 01/16/2026 - 10:20

JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS, 2026, 139, 035102

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