Elena Pandres and Matthew Crane publish the results of a longstanding collaborative effort between the Holmberg lab and the Pauzauksie group (UW Materials Science and Engineering) in Nature Communications. The paper, titled “Optically Oriented Attachment of Nanoscale Metal-Semiconductor Heterostructures in Organic Solvents via Photonic Nanosoldering”, describes how nanoscale semiconductor building blocks dispersed in organic solvents can be aligned, assembled, and welded together using focused laser light!
You can read more about the work here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12827-w
You can watch videos of the trapping and assembly processes here and here.