NANOSCIENCE - Peidong Yang, co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at University of California, Berkeley, has been selected as one of 2014’s Nobel Prize-worthy researchers by Thompson Reuters. Thompson Reuters compiles its list by analyzing the impact of scientific research. It began its predictions 12 years ago. Since then, nine of its selections won the Nobel Prize the same year they were cited and 16 won within two years. Yang is of the world’s most cited chemists and material scientists. He is best known for his 2001 invention of the first room-temperature nanowire laser. Nanowire lasers are just what they sound like, tiny nanoscale rods that emit laser light. They are usually 5 to 500 nanometers in diameter (a fraction of the width of a human hair) and 1,000 times or more longer than they are wide. This is so small, they actually force the electrons in their atoms into energy states not found in bulk materials. This generates unusual quantum properties. While Yang had to pump his first nanowires with an outside laser, nanowires now act as self-contained lasers, optical sensors, waveguides to transfer light, and substrates for high-efficiency solar cells. And unlike most lasers, nanowire lasers are small enough to fit on computer chips. As scientists learn to manipulate light in structures smaller than the wavelength of the light itself, nanowires could become an essential element in chip-level optical computing and communications. Yang has shown he can alter properties by building nanowires in different ways. For example, he has made nanowires from layers of different materials while sheathing other nanowires in different materials to alter optical properties. Yang’s current work focuses on building artificial structures that do photosynthesis. In 2013 he was part of a team that reported the worlds first, fully integrated artificial nanoscale photosynthesis system. You can read Peidong Yang’s citation at bit.ly/1DF86BV. You can see Thompson Reuters’s top researchers (including Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute researchers Omar Yaghi and Paul Alivisatos) at bit.ly/1uu6ZCy.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 23:30:54 +0000
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