Patterning porosity in hydrogels by arresting phase separation

Poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogels have been used extensively in biological and tissue engineering, because of their outstanding biocompatibility and processability. However, it is not yet possible to process soft materials like PEG hydrogels with the requisite precision and throughput needed to recapitulate macroscopic biological tissue with control over every hierarchical scale. In this study, porous PEG hydrogels are processed by a phase separation method and patterned in a single photolithographic step. The thermodynamics of the temperature triggered spinodal decomposition of a ternary mixture of water, salt, and polymer are studied resulting in a ternary phase diagram and a spinodal temperature plot. Importantly, the state of porosity can be frozen by exposing the hydrogel to UV light to form a crosslinked hydrogel network. The average pore size can be tuned by changing delay between the application of heat and UV exposure. By utilizing grey-scale photomasks, a single process can be used to define regions of pure hydrogel, porous hydrogel with a programmed average pore size, and blank substrate with no hydrogel. In addition to representing a combination of a top-down and a bottom-up processes that enables the realization of complex samples, the simplicity of this process and the versatility of the resultant patterns could provide a useful capability for the definition of hydrogel samples for the development of advanced biomaterials

Pseudogap, competing order and coexistence of staggered flux and d-wave pairing in high-temperature superconductors

We study the t-J-V model of a doped Mott insulator in connection to high-T_c superconductors. The nearest neighbor Coulomb interaction (V) is treated quantum mechanically on equal footing as the antiferromagnetic exchange interaction (J). Motivated by the SU(2) symmetry at half-filling, we construct a large-N theory which allows a systematic study of the interplay between staggered flux order and superconductivity upon doping. We solve the model in the large-N limit and obtain the ground state properties and the phase diagram as a function of doping. We discuss the competition and the coexistence of the staggered flux and the d-wave superconductivity in the underdoped regime and the disappearance of superconductivity in the overdoped regimeComment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published versio

Itinerant and localized magnetism on the triangular lattice: sodium rich phases of Nax_xCoO2_2

We study the interplay between correlation, itinerant ferromagnetism and local moment formation on the electron doped triangular lattice of sodium cobaltates Na$_x$CoO$_2$. We find that strong correlation renormalizes the Stoner criterion and stabilizes the paramagnetic state for $x<x_c\simeq0.67$. For $x>x_c$, ferromagnetic (FM) order emerges. The enhanced Na dopant potential fluctuations play a crucial role in the sodium rich phases and lead to an inhomogeneous FM state, exhibiting nonmagnetic Co$^{3+}$ patches, antiferromagnetic (AF) correlated regions, and FM clusters with AF domains. Hole doping the band insulator at x=1 leads to the formation of local moments near the Na vacancies and AF correlated magnetic clusters. We explain recent observations by neutron, $\mu$SR, and NMR experiments on the evolution of the magnetic properties in the sodium rich phases.Comment: revtex4 file, 5 pages, 3 figures, published versio