Title: "Nanostructured Origami"

Speaker: George Barbastathis, MIT, Mechanical Engineering

When/where: Tuesday, January 20th, 4:15PM, 200 AKW

Abstract: Nanostructured Origami is a method to construct 3D nanostructures out of 2D nanopatterened substrated by folding the substrates and properly selected locations. From the technology point of view, the main attractive feature is that one can use almost exclusively 2D lithography tools, which are well developed and widely available, whereas 3D lithography techniques are inherently more "exotic." More fundamentally, origami (inspired by the Japanes art of paper-folding) presents some interesting opportunities for manipulating the geometry of micro and nano systems to accomplish certain information processing functions, for example controlling the complexity of interconnects and delay times in feedback loops. Intriguingly, folded structures are often observed in nature, in cases where complex information processing functions must be distributed in space (proteins and the central nervous system, for example.) In this talk, we will review our group's progress in understanding these topics and fabricating nanostructured origami demonstrations, and conclude with a brief discussion of future applications.