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Science 23 January 2004:
Vol. 303. no. 5657, pp. 482 - 483
DOI: 10.1126/science.1093951
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Perspectives

Also see the archival list of Science's Compass: Enhanced Perspectives

MATERIALS SCIENCE:
Enhanced: Making Nanoscale Materials with Supercritical Fluids

Keith P. Johnston and Parag S. Shah

Nature uses templates to grow bone and other biominerals. As Johnston and Shah describe in their Perspective, this concept has been applied by Pai et al. to create silicate films with highly ordered pores and low dielectric constants. In this work, reported in the same issue, block copolymer micelles were used as the template. Supercritical carbon dioxide was used as the solvent to swell the polymer enough to allow the reactants to enter. Not only are the silicate films created in this way of interest in microelectronics, but the synthesis rate was fast enough to be useful in a fabrication facility.

The authors are in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Texas Materials Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA. E-mail: kpj{at}che.utexas.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)