Homare Arima

Soft porous materials with structural flexibility exhibit guest-induced structural transitions. The transition behavior varies depending on the particle size of the material. The particle size dependence suggested that the transition behaviors differ individually among particles; however, conventional methods, which measure averaged responses of bulk powder samples (typically on the order of tens of mg, or about one trillion particles), cannot resolve such differences. To overcome the limitation, he proposed a novel method that combines atomic force microscopy with thermodynamic analysis to identify the transition behavior at the single-particle level.