Engineers Discover Nanoscale Balancing Act That Mirrors Forces at Work in Living Systems, University of Michigan Study

A delicate balance of atomic forces can be exploited to make nanoparticle superclusters that are uniform in size—an attribute that's important for many nanotech applications but hard to accomplish, University of Michigan researchers say. The same type of forces are at work bringing the building blocks of viruses together, and the inorganic supercluster structures in this research are in many ways similar to viruses. U-M chemical engineering professors Nicholas Kotov and Sharon Glotzer led the research. The findings are newly published online in Nature Nanotechnology.