Project Grant DESC0025180

Professor Franz Geiger of Northwestern University was awarded a $537,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to study electrostatic structure and dynamics at electrode-electrolyte interfaces using nonlinear optics techniques. The three-year award, issued on May 1, 2022, supports the use of laser methods like heterodyne-detected second harmonic generation to directly observe the arrangement of water molecules and ions...

This $222,559 National Science Foundation project grant supports the development of new computational tools for characterizing charge transport processes at the quantum level by Professors Erik Hoy of Rowan University and Andrew Sand of Butler University. Funded under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program, this three-year award will see the joint research team create multi-configurational methods based on multi-configuration pair density functional theory combined with non-equilibrium...

This three-year, $345,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program supports collaborative research between the University of Notre Dame and Pennsylvania State University to investigate ion mobility in aqueous acids, bases, and salts. The researchers will take a fully integrated experimental and theoretical modeling approach to explore ionic mobility at the molecular level and achieve a unified understanding of how counterions and ion-pairing...

This $600,000 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Federal Grant Program (CFDA 47.049) supports Arizona State University (ASU) in developing theoretical models and computational algorithms to study the properties and behavior of polarity, mobility, and electrical conductivity of proteins, colloidal particles, and electrified interfaces. The research aims to provide predictive models and...

This $650,000 project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems will fund research into the fundamental role of confinement on ionic structure and dynamics in highly concentrated electrolytes. Awarded under the NSF's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), the three-year award to the University of California, Berkeley supports investigation of how confinement impacts battery system performance. The research will yield...

This $480,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences program supports a 3-year research project conducted by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (Tees) to investigate the phase behavior of polyelectrolyte complexes and multilayers. The project aims to expand the understanding of how molecular factors, such as hydrogen bonding and charge, influence the solid-liquid phase boundaries in these charged polymer materials,...

This $400,000 National Science Foundation project grant, awarded through the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041), will fund research at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to improve fundamental understanding of the structure, dynamics, and electromechanical actuation of aqueous electrolytes in nanoporous media. Over a three-year period beginning September 1, 2022, the grantee will apply experiments and molecular simulations to characterize the formation of the electric double layer in...

Professor Valentine Vullev of the University of California, Riverside will use a $952,262 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program to develop new approaches for improving the efficiency of desired charge-transfer processes. Over a three-year period ending August 2025, Professor Vullev and their research team will work to better understand how intrinsic electric dipoles affect charge transfer at the nanoscale. They will develop optical...

This Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), supports research at the University of Chicago to explore a method of polymer synthesis mediated by electric fields. The $200,000 award, effective from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2026, will focus on understanding the mechanism of how electric fields can be used to control and mediate the vibration of particles that produce chemical reactions, with the goal of...

This Project Grant award of $631,792 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences program aims to develop material processes and devices that maximize the ferroelectric performance and endurance of trench capacitors for energy-efficient data storage. The key technical objectives are to: 1) Demonstrate non-planar, hafnia-based devices exhibiting greater than 10^15 switching endurance under back-end-of-line semiconductor processing conditions, and 2) Develop a...