STATEN ISLAND — Professor Bhanu Chauhan, Co-Director of the NYSTAR-funded Center for Engineered Polymeric Materials at CUNY College of Staten Island, and his students have devised a synthetic route to designer silver necklaces assembled with the help of silicones at a length scale of billionths of a meter across. Designing new materials with otherwise unattainable properties is one of the promises of nanotechnology. In the American Chemical Society Journal Macromolecules, the team of Chauhan and his student Rajesh Sardar disclosed the precision chemistry methods developed at CUNY-CSI to tune the particles' sizes in increments of less than one nanometer. This methodology also allows tailoring of the experimental conditions so that silver particles would assemble themselves into repeating patterns in the form of nanonecklaces.