all Charles M. Lieber stories

NIH names Harvard Pioneers, Innovators

404132862 — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:25:41 -0400

Harvard faculty members comprise almost 20 percent of the 47 scientists nationally whose promising and innovative work was today recognized with the announcement of two grant programs through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The grants, expected to total $138 million over five years for all recipients, recognize established researchers through the Pioneer Award and young scientists through the New Innovator Award.

The awards support potentially high-impact research whose approaches have the potential to transform biomedical and behavioral science.

Nanowire makes own electricity

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:41:55 -0400

Harvard chemists have built a new wire out of photosensitive materials that is hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. The wire not only carries electricity to be used in vanishingly small circuits, but generates power as well.

Charles M. Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry, and colleagues created the nanowire out of three different kinds of silicon with different electrical properties. The silicon is wrapped in layers to create the wire. When light falls on the outer material, a process begins due to the interaction of the core with the shell layers, leading to the creation of electrical charges.

The work was described in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Nanowire generates its own electricity

404132862 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:04:24 -0400

The work was described in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Nanowire arrays can detect signals along individual neurons

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:58:22 -0400

Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons.

Harvard chemist Charles M. Lieber and colleagues report on this marriage of nanowires and neurons this week in the journal Science.

Making the world's smallest gadgets even smaller

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:33 -0400

You may not have noticed, but the smallest revolution in world history is under way. Laboratories and factories have begun to make medical sensors and computer-chip components smaller than a single blood cell or the periods on this page.

Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry, has been making such diminishingly small things for years. He and his colleagues at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences have fabricated detectors for viruses and prostate cancer that measure about 10 nanometers (50 atoms) in size.

The race to the bottom of matter involves not only constructing smaller, more efficient devices but also finding better ways to make the tools needed to produce these things. In the Nov. 25, 2005 issue of the journal Science, Lieber, along with graduate students Chen Yang and Zhaohui Zhong, announced a unique way to fabricate nanodevices.

Instead of using conventional methods to make wires that connect together nanotransistors and other circuit components, this team built the components right into the wires. Rather than constructing a device that is later programmed to contain information and to perform a function, they built the information and function right into the wires.

Here's the way Lieber puts it: "We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel devices and applications."

New cancer detector developed that's fast, sensitive, reliable

50443248 — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:33:26 -0400

Cancers and many other diseases often reveal themselves by the presence of proteins absent or inactive in people who do not suffer from such ailments. Researchers are finding new biomarkers, as they are called, at a rapid pace, and they promise faster, more reliable ways to detect a disease earlier and to determine the prospect of recovering from it.

To take advantage of these "hot" new sources of information, researchers at Harvard University have developed a cracker-size electric sensor boasting wires thousands of times thinner than a human hair. In the near future, such sensors might test people for cancer while they wait in their doctor's office, or be implanted under their skin to monitor disease progression or the effectiveness of treatments.

Scientists create high-speed nanowire circuits

50443248 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:15:22 -0400

Chemists and engineers at Harvard University have made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer solid performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon.
The researchers, led by chemist Charles M. Lieber and engineer Donhee Ham, produced circuits at low temperature by running a nanowire-laced solution over a glass substrate, followed by regular photolithography to etch the pattern of a circuit. Their merging of low-temperature fabrication and nanowires in a high-performance electronic device is described this week in the journal Nature.

A giant step toward miniaturization

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:35:38 -0400

Incredibly tiny integrated circuits could have applications well beyond faster, smaller computers and cell phones with features only fantasized about today. For example, nanocircuits might make possible sensors that can detect a single virus in your blood. "It could turn manufacturing of high-end technology upside down," says Charles Lieber, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry. "It could affect all electronic circuits in the world. And that's really cool." This is the first time that bridging two different types of materials has been done at the nanometer level. The implications for more efficient electronics and sensing devices are obvious. Lieber is already working with Intel Corp., the world's largest producer of electronic chips.

Building circuits measured in molecules

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:26:30 -0400

Yu Huang, a doctoral student in Professor Charles Lieber's lab, has used fluid flows to arrange tiny bits of wires that are just billionths of a meter wide into millimeter-long lengths. By switching the direction of subsequent flows, Huang has been able to create grids of these wires that could function as electronic circuits. The ability to layer these grids lays the foundation for creating more complex devices. Huang's work made her one of six winners of the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2002 and the second winner from Lieber's lab in two years. Announced in November 2002, the award is sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and comes with a $20,000 prize. The award is designed to identify the most advanced collegiate technology research in all fields of science.

Nanowire used to sense cancer marker

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:20:13 -0400

Professor Charles Lieber and his students have made wires whose thinness is measured in atoms instead of fractions of an inch. That allowed Lieber's team to develop what is likely to be an important scientific tool, a coated wire capable of detecting low levels of a protein that marks the presence or recurrence of prostate cancer. "The device immediately senses levels of PSA (prostate-specific antigen) four times smaller than is now possible with blood tests that often take days," says Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Liber believes it will be possible to expand the use of such unimaginably small wires to sense the presence of malignancies, such as breast and ovarian cancers, as well as other types of diseases, and pathogens used in biological warfare.

Carbon bits to revolutionize computer construction

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:03:55 -0400

Nanotubes are a hundred times stronger than steel, able to bend without breaking, and efficient at conducting electricity. But to see them you have to look into a powerful microscope. "Nano" means billionths of a meter, or a hundred-millionths of an inch. Nanotubes are the building blocks for a new computing paradigm. Harvard chemists hope they will create the next revolution in computer construction. Nanomachines could combine high computing power with extremely low electrical requirements. They might make possible a new realm of portable, wearable, or even implantable computers that aid in the detection and monitoring of diseases, says Charles Lieber, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.