When it comes to solving some of the world’s most pressing issues, the solution might not be so easy to identify. If we are talking about nanocrystals, it is quite literally almost invisible. 

But that is where The Center for Single-Entity Nanochemistry and Nanocrystal Design (CSENND) comes in.  

The center, which launched in 2022, recently received $20 million in Phase 2 funding through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Centers for Chemical Innovation program. 

Led by Indiana University, CSENND is a collaborative effort between nine institutions, the other partners being Temple University, Texas A&M University, University of Texas-Austin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania, University of Rochester and Purdue University. Collectively, the institutions will work to explore how individual nanocrystals behave, and leading the efforts on behalf of Temple is Kallie Willets, a professor in the Department of Chemistry in the College of Science and Technology. 

For the past three years, Willets and her colleagues have worked through phase one of the project. 

“This is a really big deal for us,” Willets said. “Over the last few years, we have been working with Phase 1 support, which is similar to an incubator stage. Now we are bringing in more universities and more expertise, so we can really expand our concept. This allows us to push towards innovations in nanoscience that can ultimately be translated into applications for the benefit of humanity.” 

Understanding nanocrystals is easier said than done. They are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair, and more than a quintillion nanocrystals can be contained in a tablespoon. 

They also interact very differently than when they are in their larger forms, such as metals, powders or crystals that are visible to the human eye. 

"The interesting thing with nanocrystals is that you can take a material, something that you know very well like gold or silver, shrink it down to make particles that are really small, and they don't interact with light the way they normally would,” Willets said. “We’re used to thinking of gold as being gold in color, sort of that lustrous yellow. However, when we make gold nanocrystals, we can make gold of all different colors depending on their shape and size. These emergent properties allow us to imagine new uses and new chemistry, all because we are working on this extremely small-length scale.” 

Over the next several years, CSENND will work to develop high-throughput, artificial intelligence-based technologies that will be able to quickly reveal each nanocrystal’s composition and crystalline shape and how these influence their properties and function. The group’s findings will then be used to inform other researchers and industry partners, so they can design nanocrystals with applications in biomedicine, electronics, fuel production, chemical manufacturing and other areas. 

“There’s a lot of different materials, there’s a lot of different shapes that we can make and there’s even different size scales that we can explore,” Willets said. “All of these possible combinations make it challenging to identify the most promising nanocrystal candidates for specific applications. Our goal is to explore the parameter space of nanocrystal synthesis and function in a more efficient way to get towards those applications that will really have a positive impact on this world.” 

CSENND is funded through the NSF Centers for Chemical Innovation program, which supports research centers focused on major, long-term challenges in fundamental chemistry.