WASHINGTON—Nov. 13, 2014—The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing and design – in consultation with Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) – today presented its University Research Award to professors from University of California, Berkeley and University of Texas at Dallas in recognition of their outstanding contributions to semiconductor research.
Dr. Tsu-Jae King Liu, TSMC Distinguished Professor in...
Chemistry professor Gabor Somorjai has won the 2015 William H. Nichols Award of the New York Section of the American Chemical Society.
The award is presented annually “to encourage original research by recognizing an outstanding contribution in the field of chemistry.” The award was established in 1902 by William H. Nichols, a president of the ACS. It is the first award authorized by the society.
Somorjai will receive the award at a ceremony to be held in New York on March 13, 2015. He joins a long list of College of Chemistry faculty members who have received the award,...
If a plant can do it, Armand Paul Alivisatos can probably do it better. When it comes to photosynthesis, the process of converting sunlight into energy, no scientist understands the complexities of Mother Nature like the University of California Berkeley researcher, a leader in the quest for clean, renewable energy. In a 2000 article, Alivisatos revealed that non-metal nanocrystals – round clusters of atoms – could be manipulated into rod formations measuring a thousand times thinner than a human hair. These wire-like structures, applicable in microscopic electronic devices, play a...
This year’s recently announced American Physical Society (APS) Fellows include five scientists from Berkeley Lab, two from the Materials Sciences Division and one each from the Accelerator and Fusion Research, Nuclear Science, and Engineering divisions. APS Fellows are elected by their peers for “exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise; e.g., outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education.”
Alex Zettl of the Materials Sciences Division, and a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at Berkeley, has won the 2013 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology Experiment. Named in honor of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman whose seminal essay, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” is widely credited with launching the field of nanoscience, the Feynman prizes — one for theoretical work and one for experimental research — annually recognize scientists whose work has advanced Feynman’s vision. Zettl was cited for his “exceptional work in the fabrication of...
SOMETHING VERY SMALL has the potential to make some very big changes in our world.
Over the past decade, nanoscale materials and devices so small that hundreds could fit inside the diameter of a single strand of hair, have begun to show up in everything from golf clubs to targeted drug delivery systems and new types of optical and electronic devices. In the laboratory, researchers are demonstrating nanoscale devices that may hold the key to quantum computing, artificial photosynthesis, high-speed genomic analysis, and even invisibility cloaks.
A flat mesh of light-absorbing semiconductor nanowires can split water molecules, producing hydrogen gas that could be used for fuel.
The “artificial leaf” was developed by a team led by professor Dr. Peidong Yang of University of California, Berkeley, and professor Dr. Bin Liu of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The mesh works without any electron mediators. The researchers said that large-scale networks of the mesh could be made using low-cost solution synthesis and vacuum filtration techniques. The hydrogen created by these mesh...
A door has been opened to low-power off/on switches in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoelectronic devices, as well as ultrasensitive bio-sensors, with the first observation of piezoelectricity in a free standing two-dimensional semiconductor by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and an international authority on nanoscale engineering, led a study in which piezoelectricity – the conversion of mechanical energy into...
High-speed reading of the genetic code should get a boost with the creation of the world’s first graphene nanopores – pores measuring approximately 2 nanometers in diameter – that feature a “built-in” optical antenna. Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have invented a simple, one-step process for producing these nanopores in a graphene membrane using the photothermal properties of gold nanorods.
“With our integrated graphene nanopore with plasmonic optical antenna, we can obtain direct optical DNA sequence detection,” says Luke Lee, the...
If you can uniformly break the symmetry of nanorod pairs in a colloidal solution, you’re a step ahead of the game toward achieving new and exciting metamaterial properties. But traditional thermodynamic -driven colloidal assembly of these metamaterials, which are materials defined by their non-naturally-occurring properties, often result in structures with high degree of symmetries in the bulk material. In this case, the energy requirement does not allow the structure to break its symmetry.
In a study led by Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, he and...