Prof. Yakobson receives Outstanding Faculty Research Award, the top honor for faculty

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Evgeni Penev

School of Engineering celebrates faculty and staff

The 2019 Outstanding Faculty Research Award is awarded to a faculty member who most contributed to highly impactful publications or publicly available software, based on research conducted at Rice and published/developed during the period January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2018.

Prof. Yakobson has 4 patents and has published ~350 journal papers with more than 32,000 citations and an h-index of 86. Among the 20 Rice faculty profiles on Google Scholar with highest total number of citations, he is one of the top-three with the highest citations growth, ~600/yr, for the period 2013–2017. Yakobson’s Research Group maintains a vivid research group website that has been visited over this period by ~25,000 users from ~110 countries, collecting ~100,000 pageviews.

This Award also culminates a period of exciting breakthroughs in the pursuit of novel low-dimensional nanomaterials, resulting from Yakobson’s more recent work (2013–2015) in the field of materials discovery.

2D borophene gets a closer look

Posted on April 13, 2019 by Evgeni Penev

Rice, Northwestern find new ways to image, characterize unique material

Graphene can come from graphite. But borophene? There’s no such thing as borite.

Unlike its carbon cousin, two-dimensional borophene can’t be reduced from a larger natural form. Bulk boron is usually only found in combination with other elements, and is certainly not layered, so borophene has to be made from the atoms up. Even then, the borophene you get may not be what you need.

For that reason, researchers at Rice and Northwestern universities have developed a method to view 2D borophene crystals, which can have many lattice configurations — called polymorphs — that in turn determine their characteristics.

Knowing how to achieve specific polymorphs could help manufacturers incorporate borophene with desirable electronic, thermal, optical and other physical properties into products.

Boris Yakobson, a materials physicist at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, and materials scientist Mark Hersam of Northwestern led a team that not only discovered how to see the nanoscale structures of borophene lattices but also built theoretical models that helped characterize the crystalline forms.

Their results are published in Nature Communications.

– See more at Rice News

Gold soaks up boron, spits out borophene

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Evgeni Penev

Rice, Argonne, Northwestern scientists show unique mechanism makes valuable 2D material

In the heat of a furnace, boron atoms happily dive into a bath of gold. And when things get cool, they resurface as coveted borophene.

The discovery by scientists from Rice University, Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University is a step toward practical applications like wearable or transparent electronics, plasmonic sensors or energy storage for the two-dimensional material with excellent conductivity.

Teams led by Boris Yakobson at Rice, Nathan Guisinger at Argonne and Mark Hersam at Northwestern both formed the theory for and then demonstrated their novel method to grow borophene – the atom-thick form of boron – on a gold surface.

They found that with sufficient heat in a high vacuum, boron atoms streamed into the furnace sink into the gold itself. Upon cooling, the boron atoms reappear and form islands of borophene on the surface.

This is distinct from most other 2D materials made by feeding gases into a furnace. In standard chemical vapor deposition, the atoms settle onto a substrate and connect with each other. They typically don’t disappear into the substrate.

The discovery was described in a paper in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.