In a new direction for the FINO Lab, a paper led by Bhavesh Ramkorun through our collaboration with Profs. Ed Thomas and Saikat Chakraborty Thakur is out in Applied Physics Letters. This work combines the dusty plasma physics research in their group with the oxide materials synthesis in ours for a cool new technique to synthesis TiO2 nanoparticles. By using a titanium tetraisopropoxide precursor–the same one we use to grow SrTiO3 by MBE–Bhavesh showed that it is possible to form monodisperse nanoparticles in the plasma and deposit them onto a substrate. This kind of work had been done before with silicates and organic material, but using a metal-organic allowed him to make TiO2 for the first time. Post-growth annealing allows for crystallization into anatase and rutile. He also studied the plasma dynamics and how the particles fall out of the plasma due to gravity as they coarsen and new particles begin to nucleate. The work was funded by an NSF EPSCOR grant in the plasma group and used our Rigaku X-ray diffractometer supported by our NSF MRI grant. Congratulations Bhavesh!