NQPI News Archive 2013

Ohio University Plans Interdisciplinary Science Facility

December 17, 2013

NQPI members and research could one day be housed in what Ohio University is designating the Interdisciplinary Science Facility.

An investigation into Clippinger Laboratories has yielded a suggestion that it may be more cost effective to build a new science building, rather than renovate Clippinger. Instead, the Ohio University Board of Trustees recently included plans for the new building in the $970 million, six-year capital improvement plan they approved in November.

Design input for the Interdisciplinary Science Facility is being sought from departmental committees representing Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Geological Sciences, and other departments residing in Clippinger Laboratories. This information will be reviewed by a project committee that includes an architectural firm and selected faculty representatives.

The next step includes the programming and schematic design phases, which are expected to be completed by October 2014.

NQPI Sponsors Post-Doctoral Researchers

December 17, 2013

A $19,146 grant from NQPI has supported two post-doctoral researchers from the Department of Chemistry, Yuhuan Jin and Roymon Joseph, to continue research during the Fall 2013 semester.

NQPI Members Jeff Rack, professor of chemistry, and Eric Masson, associate professor of chemistry, have joined the forces of their respective research groups to investigate a new class of materials that exhibit non-random macroscopic deformations when irradiated with light.

“We are trying to use Eric Masson’s Cucurbituril macrocycles with our photoisomerizing compounds to make supramolecular materials that exhibit the photochemical features of the photoisomerizing compounds,” Rack explained. “When incorporated within this material, enabled by Eric’s compounds, we obtain new materials that exhibit properties not exhibited by either of the components.”

As explained by Masson, Cucurbiturils are pumpkin-shaped macrocycles which can encapsulate other molecules in their cavity.

The extra research completed by the post-docs has produced a number of scholarly results. Jin and Joseph have already presented their research during the Ohio Inorganic Weekend and the Upper Ohio Valley section of the American Chemical Society in October.

NQPI Members Conduct Physics Research during German Sabbatical

December 4, 2013

Two NQPI members returned to Athens after spending a year-long sabbatical in Berlin, Germany.

Sergio Ulloa and Nancy Sandler, condensed matter theorists and physics professors at Ohio University, spent a year teaching, researching, and learning at the Dahlem Center for Complex Quantum Matter and the Department of Physics at the Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany, from August 2012 to July 2013.

Their research is focused on learning about two-dimensional materials at the atomic level, looking at the charge (electronic) transport properties of graphene, and exploring the role of impurities in the absence and presence of relativistic interactions among charged particles, such as the spin orbit interaction.

They also taught a master’s level course on advanced current research topics in theoretical physics, and both appreciated the opportunity to teach a course outside of the standard set of graduate courses taught at OU.

“It was a lot of fun, because it was a course on state of the art research, instead of a core curriculum. Most students take courses involving core knowledge, but this was a more advanced and specialized course. Since we are at a smaller department, we don’t always have the chance to teach a more specialized course,” Ulloa said.

They are also fond of the time they spent living and learning about Berlin, which Ulloa describes as a “very interesting, dynamic city.” The family loved learning about Berlin’s history, a city that evolved from being a leading hip hop center in the early 1900s and a divided city after World War II to a leading center in physics research.

Ulloa and Sandler were not the only people to experience Berlin. They were joined by their OU post-doctoral researcher, Diego Mastrogiuseppe, and four of their students: Greg Petersen and Mahmoud Morsi, OU Ph.D. students; Daiara Farias from the Instituto de Fisica, Universidad Federal Fluminense, in Brazil; and Ramon Carrillo from the Centro de Nanociencias y Nanotecnologia at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

The sabbatical presented a unique opportunity for the young researchers to carry out their work in a highly motivating environment and establish a network of collaborators with obvious benefits in their future careers.

This husband and wife physics team began planning their sabbatical two years ago. Of the utmost importance to their planning was finding a balance of work and family life. Ulloa and Sandler wanted to work at a top-notch European research facility, but also needed a bilingual school for their seven-year-old daughter, Julia, to attend.

Despite being in one of the best physics research institutions in Europe, the amenities that the professors appreciated the most sometimes had nothing to do with equipment.

“Academia requires long periods of time to think. One of my favorite things is to stare at the ceiling and think. This sabbatical was like taking a deep breath. We had whole days of thinking and deep, creative exchanges. It was really fun to have long days discussing different physics questions,” said Sandler, who is now continuing her research at OU.

Jin Presents Work on Photomechanical Effects

October 18, 2013

An NQPI post-doctoral researcher recently presented his work on photomechanical effects during the first NanoForum of the semester.

Yuhuan Jin, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry, spoke about his research into materials that could directly convert light energy into mechanical movement.

“The photochromic molecules could alternate their molecular structure upon light irradiation, and when a appropriate approach is applied to incorporate those molecules into materials, those materials would exhibit macroscopic shape change upon light irradiation. And my work focuses on developing an efficient and low-cost way to achieve this photo-mechanical effect in amorphous or glassy polymer material,” he said.

Jin’s work could potentially be used for micro-mechanical control devices, perhaps as an adaptive aperture controller in an optical system.

Jin has been working in Prof. Jeff Rack’s research group while attending graduate school. His work in innovative photomechanical materials earned him the Graduate College Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year.

Jin graduated in May with a doctorate in Chemistry. After completing his post-doctoral research, he will return to China to pursue work in research and development at Nalco Company in Shanghai.

Separating Fact from Fiction in Nanotechnology

October 18, 2013

Don’t expect nanotechnology to produce tiny robots with artificial intelligence that devour cancer cells or ropes with carbon nanotube strands that are strong enough to build a space elevator from Earth to the orbiting stations.

These ideas are nothing but hype in the world of nanotechnology, but this science does provide tangible and real opportunities to create faster electronics and advances in medicine.

Savas Kaya, a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Russ College of Engineering and Technology, separated fact from fiction in his Science Café talk, Nanotechnology: Hype or Opportunity?, Oct. 9 at Ohio University.

“I am trying to convince you that this is not all hype. Nanotechnology is real and here. Your cell phones and memory sticks and touchscreens have it. There is potential for solutions to age-old problems,” he said.

What advances would you like to see in your cell phone in 5 or 10 years?

While nanotechnology is not likely to provide cell phones with DNA sequencing capabilities in a few years, as one audience member requested, it can likely provide the much longer battery life that many audience members wanted.

Kaya explained that silicon chips and existing batteries could eventually be replaced by novel nanomaterials like graphene, a material discovered at the nanoscale level.

“Graphene is the strongest material on Earth, 200 times stronger than steel. Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms. The discovery of graphene won a Nobel prize in 2010,” he said.

Another area where nanotechnology holds promise is medicine, which has the potential to lead to smaller, more portable devices to monitor medical conditions and dispense medicines.

“There is a lot of hope, but there is also some hype. We won’t have tiny intelligent self-replicating robots that defeat cancer running through our bloodstream or elevators to space built with super-strong carbon nanotubing.

Advances in nanotechnology are already making our lives easier and better through many portable electronic products and communication systems today, but the best is yet to come, gradually and without us noticing” Kaya reiterated.

The Science Café featuring Kaya can be viewed here.

Palmstrom Recalls Work on Growth of Novel Materials and Structures

October 15, 2013

Imagine that you could combine materials with different properties into new heterostructures with a vast range of designer properties.

Now imagine what you could create.

“What I am looking for is something that is unique, something that you might not be able to do anything with now. We are trying to solve technological problems. I don’t necessarily know what the final product will be. It might be something that no one has thought of yet. That is the only way you can beat a well-established technology,” said Chris Palmstrom, a professor of electrical and computer engineering materials at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Palmstrom fabricates new heterostructures using electronic, magnetic, and mechanical properties of dissimilar materials, as he explained to a group of 65 people at a Physics and Astronomy Department Colloquium entitled Growth of Novel Materials and Structures at Ohio University in September.

“We are trying to combine different materials, things like metals and semiconductors to make structures with new properties. If I have a metal and a semiconductor, I am going to put the two together as layers and composites to see what structures and properties I can obtain,” he said.

Palmstrom has used molecular beam epitaxial growth, in combination with in-situ and ex-situ atomic level characterization techniques, to investigate the growth of epitaxial metals on semiconductors and metal oxides, Heusler alloys, and rare earth monopnictides, which have been used to optimize properties of these heterostructures for semiconductor spintronics, thermoelectric, and shape memory applications.

Palmstrom’s work relies heavily on both theoretical work and experimentation. He often combines dissimilar materials with a specific application in mind, but the results can fall outside of his expectations.

“We have a plan or an idea on what would happen. We have a lot of curiosity. Then we do experiments to try to verify our ideas about what would happen. With some of our experiments, we have no idea what is going to happen. There is no theory. Then it is a matter of going back and trying to understand why it happened,” Palmstrom said.

Palmstrom finds the unknown nature of his work to be exciting. After all, it was a chance discovery that led to bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovering the antibiotic Penicillin in 1928. Who knows what important discoveries Palmstrom’s experiments could yield?

“A lot of what one does is an intuition of what might become a useful outcome. A lot of the things we are doing won’t have an impact in products for 10 or 20 years. We are trying to solve problems and develop technologies that we anticipate will be of importance in the future. A lot of these things, you don’t know what will come of them. You just have a feeling that maybe this could be of real importance. You have good ideas about what could be important,” he said.

“Basically, this avenue of research started with the idea of making highly reliable contacts to gallium arsenide based semiconductor electronic devices, moved on to try to make a metal-based transistor, and then ended up being used for high-performance thermoelectric material and very high speed photo detectors. We were successful in what we set out to make, highly reliable ideal contacts, but the research led to other applications that we did not dream of at the start of the research,” he said.

The professor also detailed how the unexpected results of this work have been used to create contacts to inject spin polarized electrons.

“All of the things that we learned researching these high reliability contacts have now been applied to making single crystal magnetic contacts on III-V compound semiconductors to be used as contacts to inject spin-polarized electrons. These contacts will be critical for semiconductor spintronic devices. The concept of this is to use the electron spin (spin up or down) rather than its electronic charge for the device operation. This is like magnets, which have north and south poles,” he said.

Palmstrom earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Leeds, England, in 1979. He has previously worked at the University of Minnesota, where he researched new spintronic materials that combine the functions of electronic and magnetic manipulation. Today, he is considered a leading researcher in the study of electronic materials.

Physicist Volker Rose Solves Picasso Mystery Using Synchrotron-Based, X-ray Microscopy

September 12, 2013

Art historians have long argued over what type of paint Pablo Picasso used to create his famous masterpieces. 

Dr. Volker Rose, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, has the answer: common house paint.

Dr. Rose is part of a team of scientists and art experts who used synchrotron-based, X-ray microscopy to solve the long-running debate, as he explained to a crowd of 70 people at Ohio University on Aug. 29 during his talk “Shining Light on Nanoscale Materials: From Picasso to the Ultimate Resolution in X-ray Microscopy.”

“This problem has been heavily discussed before.  Picasso was always mixing paints, so it could be misleading for paint experts,” he said.

Dr. Rose was able to solve this problem by using a hard X-ray nanoprobe to study impurities in single pigments of paint. He and his collaborators from the Art Institute of Chicago then compared those results to original samples of white paint used by Picasso.

The main component of this white paint is zinc oxide, which also happens to be a material physicists study often, as it is used in light-emitting diodes and liquid-crystal displays in computers and TVs.

“Zinc oxide is heavily studied in spintronics. Scientists know a lot about zinc oxide, but what they don’t realize is that this is the same thing Picasso was using as white paint,” he said.

The beauty of using X-ray microscopy to perform this type of analysis is that the process does not compromise the artifact.

“You do not destroy the samples.  What is special is that we put this technology (synchrotron-based, X-ray microscopy) in an area where nothing has been done before at the nanoscale level,” he said.

The paint samples taken were as small as a grain of salt. The X-ray microscope the researchers used allowed them to study the chemical makeup of the paint at a spatial resolution of 30 nanometers, quite miniscule considering that a human hair is approximately 50,000 nanometers thick, or the head of a pin is around 1 million nanometers across.

Dr. Rose has also used this technique to study the corrosive patterns of daguerreotypes, early photographs created on silver-plated copper plates.

For future work, Dr. Rose’s team has developed a unique method to study nanoscale materials by combining scanning probe microscopy with synchrotron X-rays.  This technique allows an understanding of structure and provides detailed information about chemical, electronic, and magnetic state.

Dr. Rose thinks that his research is a perfect example of how scientists and artists can work together. He saw this project as an opportunity for a new collaborative area of research between scientists and art historians: to use the nanoprobe to study cultural heritage objects under microscopic conditions at the nanoscale level.

Dr. Rose, who is an Early Career Awardee of the U.S. Department of Energy, graduated with a doctorate in physics from RWTH Aachen University in Germany in 2005. He works as a physicist in a joint appointment between the Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory.

NQPI to Host SP-STM 5 Conference

August 15, 2013

NQPI is proud to announce that it will host the next edition of the Spin-Polarized Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Conference in July 2014. SP-STM 5 will be held along the beautiful shores of Lake Erie.

The conference will include in-depth discussions on all topics of spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy of magnetic and spintronic materials. The conference will also include an outing to the historic island village of Put-in-Bay, famously known as an important battle site in the War of 1812.

The tentative conference dates, July 15-19, 2014, will coincide with all conference members who also plan to attend the International Conference on Nanoscience + Technology (ICN+T 2014), which will be held the following week from July 20-25, 2014, at the Vail Cascade Resort and Spa in Vail, Colorado.

Updates on the conference are soon to follow.  For more information on the conference visit www.spstm.org.

Diniz Wins Outstanding Dissertation Award

August 15, 2013

Ginetom Diniz has been interested in physics for a long time. Having grown up next to a nuclear power plant in Angra dos Reis in the Rio de Janeiro state of Brazil, Diniz found the concept of the massive amount of energy produced from a nuclear reaction to be fascinating.

While his most recent work is not as large scale, energywise, as a nuclear reaction, his dissertation, “Electronic and Transport Properties of Carbon Nanotubes: Spin-orbit Effects and External Fields,” has won him the honor of the first NQPI Outstanding Dissertation Award, along with a $500 prize.

“In my dissertation, I discuss about the electronic transport in carbon structures in the presence of external fields (electric and magnetic), considering the effect when the electron spin is coupled with its orbital moment. One of the main proposals in this dissertation is how to use these external fields and spin-orbit coupling to manipulate electric current in devices made of carbon atoms,” Diniz said.

“We also showed that in a very special system (a hybrid system) consisting of carbon nanotubes and a DNA molecule, can generate a spin polarized currents. In practice this can be useful in molecular detectors devices and also for the spin electronics where we can use a current where its majority electron spin has one defined characteristic,” he said.

Diniz’s work offers scientists another way to control electrons, a necessary step for researchers to manipulate electron spin to create more efficient electronic devices. He hopes his work will be tested in laboratory settings, and eventually used to create faster consumer electronic devices that consume less energy.

Diniz, 31, attended the Federal University of Uberlandia in Brazil, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics in 2006 and a master’s degree in 2007. After receiving the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, he joined the doctorate program at Ohio University in 2007, where he studied the electronic/transport properties of carbon using tight-binding methods.

“I am really glad and honored to receive this award! I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Sergio Ulloa, who always supported me during my graduate studies and all my colleagues at Sergio and Nancy Sandler’s research group and the staffs from the Department of Physics that are so helpful with us,” Diniz said.

Diniz is currently working as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Physics at the University of Brasilia in Brazil.

NQPI Members’ Article Receives Physical Review B Editors’ Suggestion

June 26, 2013

An article written by an Ohio University Ph.D. student and his adviser has received the coveted Editors’ Suggestion icon from Physical Review B.

Physics Ph.D. student Mahmoud Asmar and Prof. Sergio Ulloa’s article, Rashba spin-orbit interaction and birefringent electron optics in graphene, was published in February by Physical Review B. Certain articles that the editors find of particular interest, importance or clarity receive the highly esteemed Editors’ Suggestion icon.

The article exploits an analogy between geometrical optics and electron trajectories. Asmar believes that a major factor for the publication’s mark is its use of relativistic quantum mechanics in the semi-classical limit.

Hla and Team Develop Molecular Motor

June 26, 2013

A cross-Atlantic team has developed an artificial motor comprised of around only 190 atoms. The team was led by Dr. Saw Hla, a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University.

The nanomachine has only three parts: a tripod to support it vertically, a rotor necessary to rotate, and an atomic ball bearing to connection the stationary and rotating parts.

At just one nanometer tall and two nanometers wide, this molecular motor is incredibly small, especially considering that just one sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick.

Energy can be provided to the nanomachine by injecting electrons, which can influence the clockwise or counterclockwise rotation of the motor, or by using thermal energy, similar to a traditional engine. To work with the molecular motor, Hla and his team utilize a tunneling microscope.

The hope for the molecular motor is that it will be able to transport information at the small scale. For something so small, the molecular motor provides a vast array of possibilities, such as eliminating pollution for water or air, infiltrating diseases, like cancer, within the body, and improving electronics.

Botte Named a Charter Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors

June 26, 2013

An NQPI member was named a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors this spring. Geradine Botte, a professor of Russ College of Engineering and Technology, has developed a variety of technologies that project the possibilities of the future.

With 11 patents already issued, and 27 still pending, these projects include a sensor that could reduce the amount of time a patient sits during dialysis treatment by monitoring urea levels in a patient’s blood, and a process that allows graphene to be synthesized from coal.

One of her inventions, which produces hydrogen, is in the process of commercialization. The device, trademarked the GreenBox, is comprised of individual cells packing a low electrical voltage of 0.8 volts each. When ammonia-contaminated water passes through the machine, the electrical current divides the ammonia into nitrogen, which is released in the air, and hydrogen, which becomes a valuable byproduct, all in a relatively short period of time, like a few hours.

“I love the fact that I am in a university environment that supports this type of innovation and approach. I love to see the faces of the students when they are engaged in these types of projects; the way they get excited, because they know they are contributing to something big that has no price,” Botte said.

Govorov Named Fellow to American Physical Society

April 12, 2013

Ohio University Physics Professor and NQPI Faculty Member Alexander Govorov joins an elite group of physicists, having been recently elected as a fellow in the American Physical Society. At the society's March 2013 meeting in Baltimore, Govorov's research was displayed in three different sessions.

"Being elected a Fellow is a substantial honor, as only 0.5 percent of the membership of each division receives this honor annually," notes colleague D.A. Drabold, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Ohio University.

"Dr. Govorov is incredibly productive, and this is a most fitting honor! Sasha is a theorist that many experimentalists have delighted at working with for his insight into physical phenomena," says David Ingram, chair of Physics and Astronomy in the Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences.

Govorov joins a long, distinguished line of APS fellows in the department. Ohio faculty elected as fellows include Carl Brune, David Drabold, Charlotte Elster, Ken Hicks, Peter Jung, Daniel Phillips, Madappa Prakash and Sergio Ulloa.

The American Physical Society citation notes that Govorov was elected "for contributions to the understanding of optical properties of semiconductor and metal nanostructures, including elucidation of the optical Aharonov-Bohm and nonlinear Fano effects."