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[Joel Henzie](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9190-2645)

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[Twenty-Five Years along the Nanometer](https://mdr.nims.go.jp/datasets/8830948c-273d-4c4d-a0cd-621c56bc85be)

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Twenty-Five Years along the NanometerTwenty-Five Years along the NanometerJoel Henzie*Cite This: Nano Lett. 2025, 25, 17255−17257 Read OnlineACCESS Metrics & More Article RecommendationsOver 25 years, Nano Letters has chronicled the rise ofnanoscience. The journal also holds the peculiardistinction of publishing my first paper as a graduatestudent. Looking back now, I find myself returning to a few earlycurrents that shaped the field, the journal, and also impacted thearc of my career. In 2002, as a graduate student in an organicchemistry program, I stumbled across a viewpoint article byProfessor George Whitesides titled “Self-Assembly at AllScales”.1 What struck me was not just the topic, but the waythe essay transformed “self-assembly” into a shared vocabularythat spanned chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering. Itrearranged my thinking: the idea that one principle couldprovide common ground across such disparate disciplines feltlike someone had redrawn the intellectual map I thought Iunderstood. I had also read about George’s “open laboratory”policy, which I took, perhaps naively, as a literal invitation. A fewmonths later, I was in Cambridge, learning from his students andpostdocs about soft lithography, microcontact printing, andeven the finer points of making espresso. Their quest forsimplicity and accessibility in science was compelling: the notionthat profound experiments could be carried out with modest,almost improvised tools. That sensibility resonated deeply, andit set me on a different course. Within a few months, I left myorganic chemistry program and transferred to NorthwesternUniversity in 2003, where I joined the lab of Professor TeriOdom.I began my research in Teri’s group in late 2003, just a fewyears after the launch of the U.S. National NanotechnologyInitiative (NNI; January 2000)2 and the debut of Nano Letters(November 2000).3 At the time, “nanoscience” was still acontested label in some corners of academia, wryly dismissed asclever rebranding or “surface science with better tools”. Yet theact of defining a field by a particular length scale�thenanometer�was radical in the sense that it provided a unifyinglanguage that gave the movement visibility and momentum and,just as importantly, offered a common funding target. Suddenly,chemists, physicists, engineers, and biologists could assembleunder the same banner, speaking in a shared idiom of scale�afield evolving under a single unit. Nano Letters became animportant place where our shared idiom of scale took shape.My first publication appeared in Nano Letters in 2005.4 Thework seems simple by today’s standards, but we were working innewly cleared ground. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to tell a briefstory about how those early experiments shaped my career. Inthat paper, we described a straightforward way�using photo-lithography, anisotropic etching, and templated deposition�tofabricate free-standing multimetallic nanopyramids with nano-scale tips (Figure 1A).5 The structures were simple to make yetcarried incredible power: their anisotropic shape and ultrasharptips concentrated electromagnetic (EM) fields. An unexpectedbyproduct of the fabrication process were these large-area (>1in2) free-standing metal films perforated with arrays ofnanoholes (Figure 1B). The nanohole arrays became myprimary project, which was also published in Nano Letters,demonstrating how light coupled with Au and Au/Ni nanoholearrays through surface plasmons (SPs) and showing to whatmagnitude the SPs mediate enhanced light transmission, at atime when the field of plasmonics was beginning to emerge as adistinct area of research.6−8The ideas behind those pyramids and nanoholes�how thestructure of metals affects and concentrates EM fields, and howsimple fabrication methods can reveal new physics�became atoolkit I carried forward. They also hinted at something Iunderstood but did not yet have the language for: that absenceitself could act as an active structure, that the voids shaping EMfields were as important as the metal defining them. As a postdocin Professor Peidong Yang’s lab at UC Berkeley in 2008, mymethods shifted from hard physical templates carved in siliconto soft chemical templates that encode shape on the nativecrystal habit of the metal. I learned to synthesize monodispersesilver (Ag) nanocrystals with precise polyhedral shapes (Figure1C), which demanded a deeper understanding of metal redoxchemistry and, indirectly, the catalytic properties of metals. Wewere part of a large, multi-institutional project studying surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and we usedhierarchical self-assembly to pack particles into finite clusterswith nanoscale gaps and voids that generated strong EM fieldsfor chemical sensing.9 At the time, it seemed natural to assumethat larger extended structures would yield even stronger SERSPublished: December 4, 2025Nano Letters became an importantplace where our shared idiom of scaletook shape.Viewpointpubs.acs.org/NanoLett© 2025 The Author. Published byAmerican Chemical Society17255https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416Nano Lett. 2025, 25, 17255−17257This article is licensed under CC-BY 4.0Downloaded via NATL INST FOR MATLS SCIENCE (NIMS) on January 14, 2026 at 03:04:52 (UTC).See https://pubs.acs.org/sharingguidelines for options on how to legitimately share published articles.https://pubs.acs.org/action/doSearch?field1=Contrib&text1="Joel+Henzie"&field2=AllField&text2=&publication=&accessType=allContent&Earliest=&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?goto=articleMetrics&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?goto=recommendations&?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/toc/nalefd/25/50?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/toc/nalefd/25/50?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/toc/nalefd/25/50?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/toc/nalefd/25/50?ref=pdfpubs.acs.org/NanoLett?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org?ref=pdfhttps://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?urlappend=%3Fref%3DPDF&jav=VoR&rel=cite-ashttps://pubs.acs.org/NanoLett?ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/NanoLett?ref=pdfhttps://acsopenscience.org/researchers/open-access/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/signals, but under the conditions we explored they rarely did.That mismatch between expectation and outcome wascharacteristic of the era: nanoscience was expanding rapidly,and scientists were trying to pin down the rules linking structure,order, and scale to function. Transient insights were quicklyfrozen into figures and manuscripts; many of those earlyattempts found their way into Nano Letters, where some havesince become part of the field’s foundation.Around the same time, researchers in statistical physics andmaterials theory were applying geometric and statistical-mechanical methods to three-dimensional packing problems.10I wondered whether their “optimal packings” were merelyabstract constructs or physically accessible states of matter. Weused soft lithography to create microfluidic chambers and thenrelied on gravity to assemble the Ag polyhedra into thesedensest-known packings (Figure 1D).11 With octahedra, addingexcess polymer surfactant tipped the balance of forces: depletioninteractions encouraged face-to-face packing instead of theedge-overlapping densest Minkowski lattice. Even in these tinysystems, entropy was quietly dictating the architecture of matter.For me, it was a reminder that even modest experiments canreveal how mathematical packings connect to the states mattercan actually adopt.As a student and postdoc in the U.S., I had worked alongsidemany brilliant foreign researchers, and through them, I caughtglimpses of the immigrant experience�with its challenges anddislocation, but also the way it could foster determination andresilience. In 2012, I had the opportunity to experience thisfirsthand when I moved to Japan to become a staff scientist at theNational Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba.Tsukuba was conceived in the 1960s and 70s as Japan’s ‘ScienceCity’�built from scratch partly to relieve overcrowding inlaboratories in Tokyo and to strengthen Japan’s researchcapacity. Today, Tsukuba hosts 29 national research andeducational institutions, plus a dense cluster of industrial R&Dfacilities. Approximately 20,000 researchers reside and workhere, in a city of just a quarter of a million people, wheregovernment, academia, and industry are unusually intertwined.At NIMS, I joined a multidisciplinary team investigating theoptical and electrocatalytic properties of metals�an arc ofinquiry that ultimately led me to mesoporous metals. My earlywork on the plasmonics of nanohole arrays and self-assemblednanoparticles had already shown that voids, or “negative space”,were as important as the metal itself. Living and working inJapan, I began to see this principle through the concept of ma ,a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical notion of meaningfulspace, or the interval that gives form and significance to whatFigure 1. Across the author’s somewhat eclectic journey from plasmonics and nano-optics to electrocatalysis, a unifying theme emerges: thetransition from hard to soft-templated metals. (A) Fabrication scheme based on the method described in the author’s first Nano Letters paper,resulting in free-standing nanopyramids and nanohole arrays (B). (C) SEM images showing the continuous truncation of nanocubes intointermediate polyhedra and ultimately octahedra via the Ag polyol synthesis method using polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as a surfactant and Agmetal precursor. (D; left) These well-defined shapes were used to explore self-assembly and packing optimization, revealing the densest knownarrangement for octahedra�the Minkowski lattice. (D; right) Introducing excess PVP induced depletion forces that favored face-to-facepacking, yielding a less dense structure consistent with the I43d space group. (E) A schematic of the mesoporous metal synthesis method usingblock copolymermicelles as pore-directing agents. Removal of the polymer template produces a porousmetal framework, illustrated by S/TEMimages of a mesoporous gold nanoparticle. This approach is compatible with many metals and even enables the formation of high-entropyalloys, which are metals containing five or more principal elements. (F) A STEM tomography reconstruction of a single-crystal mesoporousPtPdIrRuRh high entropy alloy nanoparticle synthesized using the method in ref 14. The illustration shows the interior pores running throughthe crystal as it is progressively truncated in the rendered volume (labeled 1 to 3). The schematics and images were reproduced or adapted withpermission from ref 4 (Copyright 2005 American Chemical Society), ref 8 (Copyright 2007 Nature Publishing Group), ref 11 (Copyright 2012Nature Publishing Group), and ref 14 (Copyright 2025 American Chemical Society).Nano Letters pubs.acs.org/NanoLett Viewpointhttps://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416Nano Lett. 2025, 25, 17255−1725717256https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?fig=fig1&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?fig=fig1&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?fig=fig1&ref=pdfhttps://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?fig=fig1&ref=pdfpubs.acs.org/NanoLett?ref=pdfhttps://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416?urlappend=%3Fref%3DPDF&jav=VoR&rel=cite-assurrounds it. By using block copolymer micelles, our grouplearned to control voids in 3D: either as electrodeposited filmson complex metal templates for SERS sensing of microplastics,12or as internal cavities within nanoparticles to tune their plasmonmodes (Figure 1E).13 What began as a byproduct of makingpyramids evolved into a guiding design principle: space is notabsence but a functional element. Our group extended thisapproach across different metals and, most recently, demon-strated mesoporous single-crystal high-entropy alloys withremarkable electrocatalytic activity (Figure 1F).14 Lookingback, I see these advances as natural descendants of early workpublished in Nano Letters, which helped highlight how space andstructure could be explored at the nanoscale.It has been two decades since my first publication in NanoLetters. In that time, I developed a deeper appreciation fororganic chemistry. And nanoscience tools have becomeembedded in medicine, energy, information technology, andsecurity. With that success has come new responsibilities andoversight of ideas, of knowledge, of talent moving across theglobe. Still, in this new environment, it is worth rememberinghow much of our early progress stemmed from a spirit ofopenness that attracted talent from across the world, and thefield grew richer by integrating perspectives that no singlediscipline or country could have provided alone. That spirit isstill visible in the pages of Nano Letters, and preserving it may bethe key to the field’s next transformation.■ AUTHOR INFORMATIONCorresponding AuthorJoel Henzie− Research Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics(MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS),Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan; orcid.org/0000-0002-9190-2645; Email: HENZIE.Joeladam@nims.go.jpComplete contact information is available at:https://pubs.acs.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c04416NotesThe author declares no competing financial interest.BiographyJoel Henzie is a Principal Researcher at the Research Center forMaterials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute forMaterials Science (NIMS), Tsukuba, Japan. His research integratesexperimental, theoretical, and computational approaches to study theoptical and electrocatalytic properties of metallic nanostructures, withexperimental work centered on nanoparticle synthesis and self-assembly.■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis research was supported by the Japan Society for thePromotion of Science (JSPS) Grants-in-Aid for ScientificResearch Kakenhi Program (20K05453). A part of this workwas supported by the Advanced Research Infrastructure forMaterials and Nanotechnology in Japan (ARIM) of the Ministryof Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology(MEXT) proposal number JPMXP1225NM5056. The authorthanks Dr. Ravi Nandan for synthesizing the high-entropy alloynanoparticle used in the tomography rendering in Figure 1F.■ REFERENCES(1) Whitesides, G. M.; Grzybowski, B. Self-Assembly at All Scales.Science 2002, 295 (5564), 2418−2421.(2) National Nanotechnology Initiative: Leading to the NextIndustrial Revolution. The White House. https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/html/20000121_4.html (accessed 2025−09−24).(3) Alivisatos, P. Welcome to Nano Letters. Nano Lett. 2001, 1 (1), 1−1.(4) Henzie, J.; Kwak, E.-S.; Odom, T. W. Mesoscale Metallic Pyramidswith Nanoscale Tips. Nano Lett. 2005, 5 (7), 1199−1202.(5) Henzie, J.; Shuford, K. L.; Kwak, E. S.; Schatz, G. C.; Odom, T. W.Manipulating the Optical Properties of Pyramidal Nanoparticle Arrays.J. Phys. Chem. B 2006, 110 (29), 14028−14031.(6) Kwak, E. S.; Henzie, J.; Chang, S. H.; Gray, S. K.; Schatz, G. C.;Odom, T. W. Surface Plasmon Standing Waves in Large-AreaSubwavelength Hole Arrays. Nano Lett. 2005, 5 (10), 1963−1967.(7) Gao, H.; Henzie, J.; Odom, T. W. Direct Evidence for SurfacePlasmon-Mediated Enhanced Light Transmission through MetallicNanohole Arrays. Nano Lett. 2006, 6 (9), 2104−2108.(8) Henzie, J.; Lee, M. H.; Odom, T. W. Multiscale Patterning ofPlasmonic Metamaterials. Nat. Nanotechnol 2007, 2, 549−554.(9) Henzie, J.; Andrews, S. C.; Ling, X. Y.; Li, Z.; Yang, P. OrientedAssembly of Polyhedral Plasmonic Nanoparticle Clusters. Proc. Natl.Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2013, 110 (17), 6640−6645.(10) Jiao, Y.; Stillinger, F. H.; Torquato, S. Optimal Packings ofSuperballs. Phys. Rev. E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2009, 79,No. 041309.(11) Henzie, J.; Grünwald, M.; Widmer-Cooper, A.; Geissler, P. L.;Yang, P. Self-Assembly of Uniform Polyhedral Silver Nanocrystals intoDensest Packings and Exotic Superlattices. Nat. Mater. 2012, 11, 131−137.(12) Guselnikova, O.; Trelin, A.; Kang, Y.; Postnikov, P.; Kobashi, M.;Suzuki, A.; Shrestha, L. K.; Henzie, J.; Yamauchi, Y. Pretreatment-FreeSERS Sensing of Microplastics Using a Self-Attention-Based NeuralNetwork on Hierarchically Porous Ag Foams. Nat. Commun. 2024, 15,4351.(13) Nugraha, A. S.; Guselnikova, O.; Henzie, J.; Na, J.; Hossain, M. S.A.; Dag, Ö.; Rowan, A. E.; Yamauchi, Y. Symmetry-Breaking PlasmonicMesoporous Gold Nanoparticles with Large Pores. Chem. Mater. 2022,34 (16), 7256−7270.(14) Nandan, R.; Nam, H. N.; Phung, Q. M.; Nara, H.; Henzie, J.;Yamauchi, Y. Mesoporous Single-Crystal High-Entropy Alloy. J. Am.Chem. 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