Category Archives: Group-related news

Flat boron by the numbers

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Rice University researchers calculate what it would take to make new two-dimensional material

It would be a terrible thing if laboratories striving to grow graphene from carbon atoms kept winding up with big pesky diamonds.

“That would be trouble, cleaning out the diamonds so you could do some real work,” said Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson, chuckling at the absurd image.

Yet something like that keeps happening to experimentalists working to grow two-dimensional boron. Boron atoms have a strong preference to clump into three-dimensional shapes rather than assemble into pristine single-atom sheets, like carbon does when it becomes graphene. And boron clumps aren’t nearly as sparkly…more

Advanced Materials is Owl about Rice

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High-impact journal publishes centennial edition with broad overview of materials science at Rice

Materials scientists who received Volume 24, Issue 36 of the respected journal Advanced Materials recently may have noticed it contained Rice University research and nothing else.

That is no mistake. The journal published a special issue this fall focused on Rice, the home of a large number of materials researchers that has been recognized by a Times Higher Education survey as the best in the world.  more…

Flat boron may take many forms

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When is nothing really something? When it leads to a revelation about boron, an element with worlds of unexplored potential.

Theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his team at Rice University have taken an unusual approach to analyzing the possible configurations of two-dimensional sheets of boron, as reported this week in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. more…

Rice professor’s nanotube theory confirmed

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Air Force Research Laboratory experiment shows chirality of tube controls speed of growth

The Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, has experimentally confirmed a theory by Rice University Professor Boris Yakobson that foretold a pair of interesting properties about nanotube growth: That the chirality of a nanotube controls the speed of its growth, and that armchair nanotubes should grow the fastest. more…

Graphene rips follow rules

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A press release from Rice University Office of Public Affairs / News & Media Relations covers recent work by our group published in Nano Letters:

Rice University simulations show carbon sheets tear along energetically favorable lines

HOUSTON — (Jan. 5, 2012) — Research from Rice University and the University of California at Berkeley may give science and industry a new way to manipulate graphene, the wonder material expected to play a role in advanced electronic, mechanical and thermal applications.

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IndustryWeek: “Nanotechnology: Beyond the Hype”

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IndustryWeek has selected an image related to our very recent work on vacancy clusters in graphane as quantum dots as a front cover for its November 2010 issue.

In a recent article in ACS Nano, we discuss how complementary electronic properties and a tendency to form sharp graphene−graphane interfaces can open tantalizing possibilities for two-dimensional nanoelectronics. First-principles density functional and tight-binding calculations show that graphane can serve as natural host for graphene quantum dots, clusters of vacancies in the hydrogen sublattice. Their size n, shape, and stability are governed by the aromaticity and interfaces, resulting in formation energies ~1/√n eV/atom and preference to hexagonal clusters congruent with lattice hexagons. Clusters exhibit large gaps ~15/√n eV with size dependence typical for confined Dirac fermions.

Rice physicists dig theoretical wells to mine quantum dots

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Graphane is the material of choice for physicists on the cutting edge of materials science, and Rice University researchers are right there with the pack – and perhaps a little ahead.

Researchers mentored by Boris Yakobson, a Rice professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, have discovered the strategic extraction of hydrogen atoms from a two-dimensional sheet of graphane naturally opens up spaces of pure graphene that look – and act – like quantum dots.

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