CHICAGO MRSEC NUGGETS

International Collaboration: The Chicago/Chile Exchange

Chicago, February 2008. Universidad de Chile physics undergraduate Tibor Heumann works with this Langmuir trough in the lab of Dr. Binhua Lin. The monolayers being studied here are made of 5-nanometer thick gold nanoparticles coated with alkane surfactants. Tibor is using image analysis methods to understand how these thin layers wrinkle and fold under compression.
Santiago, Chile, July 2007. University of Chicago undergraduate Lee Walsh works with this clear plastic cylindrical sheet in the Universidad de Santiago lab of Dr. Eugenio Hamm. By making controlled depressions, he creates crescent shaped folds that move when the forces shift. He is studying how to steer these folds.
Chicago, March 2008. Since its debut in Winter 2004, the Chicago-Chile Materials Collaboration has sponsored 44 student exchange internships, under the auspices of the Chicago MRSEC. Five to seven Chilean students from the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad de Santiago come to Chicago for ten weeks each winter. Here each student performs a self-contained project in a research group. A like number of University of Chicago students go to these same Chilean universities each summer and do similar internships. Their projects have led to co-authorship of papers in Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters and other journals. Both Chicago and Chile interns praise the program highly. They credit their internships for giving them their first taste of independent research. Funding for the project comes from the NSF's Inter-American Materials Collaboration (CIAM) program and from the counterpart agency in Chile, CONICYT. The program is co-ordinated by MRSEC member Prof. Thomas Witten at Chicago and by Prof. Enrique Cerda and Prof. Nicolas Mujica in Chile.

Further information is at http://jfi.uchicago.edu/~tten/Chile/.

Winter 2008 Chilean interns left rear to right front: Tibor Heumann, administrator Pegg Anderson, Jocelyn Dunstan, Daniel Rivas, Cristian Erices, Nicolas Rivas (no relation to Daniel).