Historical research guide · 0607 · 2001

Ultrafast holographic nanopatterning of biocatalytically formed silica

Lawrence L. Brott · Rajesh R. Naik · David J. Pikas · Sean M. Kirkpatrick · David W. Tomlin · Patrick W. Whitlock · Stephen J. Clarson · Morley O. Stone

In one minute

Diatoms — single-celled algae — build intricate glass shells in ordinary seawater, at room temperature and close to neutral acidity. Laboratory chemists need extreme conditions to make far simpler shapes. Lawrence Brott, Rajesh Naik, Sean Kirkpatrick and colleagues at the Air Force Research Laboratory took the short peptide a diatom uses for this, derived from the silaffin-1 protein of Cylindrotheca fusiformis, and wrote it into a pattern with light. Laser beams interfere inside a liquid polymer, and where they overlap two photons arriving together set the polymer solid, so the interference pattern is frozen in as a hologram with the peptide locked into its structure. Dip that hologram into silicic acid and the peptide grows an ordered array of silica nanospheres exactly where the light put them. The hybrid diffracts nearly fifty times better than the same polymer hologram without silica, which is why the authors propose the approach for making photonic devices.

Connection

This one is in the library for a reason of provenance rather than physics. Chapter 1 asks the reader to weigh who is speaking and what they have actually done, and Sean Kirkpatrick — later the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, whose report is at /library/stm-b5839317cc — is here on the author line of a Nature paper in nanofabrication. The paper itself is materials science and photonics, and it has no bearing on the vacuum, plasma, fusion or metric-engineering subjects the rest of this library covers.

From the source

Diatoms create highly complex and intricate silica structures under physiological conditions, whereas duplicating even the simplest of those structures in the laboratory requires extreme conditions.Abstract, sentence 1
Following the identification of polycationic peptides from the diatom Cylindrotheca fusiformis, simple silica nanospheres can be synthesised in vitro from silanes at nearly neutral pH and at ambient temperature and pressure.Abstract, sentence 2
A hybrid organic and inorganic ordered nanostructure of silica spheres can be created by incorporating a polycationic peptide derived from the C. fusiformis silaffin-1 protein into a polymer hologram written by two-photon-induced photopolymerisation.Abstract, sentence 3
Exposing those peptide-nanopatterned holographic structures to silicic acid deposits an ordered array of silica nanospheres onto the clear polymer substrate.Abstract, sentence 4
The silica-loaded structures exhibit a nearly fifty-fold increase in diffraction efficiency over a comparable polymer hologram without silica.Abstract, sentence 5
Combining the processability of an organic polymer with the improved mechanical and optical properties of an inorganic material could be of practical use for the fabrication of photonic devices.Abstract, final sentence

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1038/35095031

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

LICENCE. The version of record is Nature, volume 413, issue 6853, pages 291 to 293, 20 September 2001; the Crossref record carries only Springer’s text-and-data-mining terms and no Creative Commons statement, and Unpaywall marks the article closed. SOURCE REACHED. The publisher’s page refuses automated requests, so the full text was not reachable; the authors’ own abstract was read in full from the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed record, PMID 11565027, and every locator below cites that abstract. No text of the article is reproduced here. WHY IT IS IN THE CORPUS. This paper enters the library through the site’s people directory, not through its physics: it is listed as a key work of Sean Kirkpatrick, the fourth author, who later directed the US All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and the directory’s own note gives the reason — he is a working physicist, which matters when weighing his assessments. The authors wrote from the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

How to cite it

Lawrence L. Brott, Rajesh R. Naik, David J. Pikas, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, David W. Tomlin, Patrick W. Whitlock, Stephen J. Clarson, Morley O. Stone (2001) Ultrafast holographic nanopatterning of biocatalytically formed silica doi:10.1038/35095031

Where it sits in the curriculum

The reference documents and the institutional record