Professor Balandin is a Plenary IEEE NMDC-2025 Conference Opening Speaker
October 2025: Professor Balandin delivers a plenary talk Thermal Properties of Graphene and Graphene Composites – Implications for Nanopackaging. The talk is opening the 2025 IEEE 20th Nanotechnology Materials and Device Conference (NMDC). The discovery of unique heat conduction properties of graphene and few-layer graphene motivated research focused on the thermal conductivity of graphene, few-layer graphene, and composites with graphene fillers. Recent developments suggest that large-scale...
Charge-density-wave coupled-oscillators solve complex optimization problems
August 2025: Jonas Brown, a graduate student researcher in the Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, built coupled charge-density-wave oscillators at the UCLA Nanofabrication Laboratory, jointly run by CNSI and UCLA Samueli, and tested them in UCLA’s Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials Laboratory. These experimental devices use electron-phonon condensate quantum properties for energy-efficient information processing at room...
Distinguished Professor Alexander Balandin Appointed to Fang Lu Endowed Chair in Engineering
July 2025: Alexander Balandin, a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been named to hold the Fang Lu Endowed Chair in Engineering. UCLA Samueli Newsroom CNSI Featured News
2D and 1D van der Waals Materials and Heterostructures
June 2025: Professor Balandin is organizing a Special Session on 2D and 1D van der Waals Materials and Heterostructures at The Workshop on Innovative Nanoscale Devices and Systems (WINDS 2025). The workshop will be held at the Mauna Lani Hotel, The Big Island, Hawaii, in December 2025. WINDS is an international and interactive workshop designed to explore the fundamental properties of nanoscale heterostructures and potential device applications. Workshop on Innovative Nanoscale Devices and...
Special Issue of the Applied Physics Letters on Thermal Properties of Graphene and Carbon Materials
June 2025: Professor Balandin is leading a Guest Editors team for the special topic issue of the Applied Physics Letters on Thermal Properties of Graphene and Carbon Materials – From Physics to Applications in Thermal Management. The special topic issue will reflect the progress in understanding the physics of heat conduction in graphene and carbon materials and describe exciting developments in the field, which is transitioning from fundamental physics to commercial applications in thermal...
MRS Symposium on One-Dimensional van der Waals Quantum Materials
May 2025: Professor Balandin is co-organizing a symposium, One-Dimensional van der Waals Quantum Materials, at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston in December 2025. This symposium will cover the emerging field of one-dimensional (1D) van der Waals (vdW) quantum materials, which exhibit quantum, strongly correlated, and topologically related properties with high potential for enabling novel device functionalities. One-Dimensional van der Waals Quantum Materials
Special Issue of the Applied Physics Letters on Advances in Inelastic Light Scattering Spectroscopies
April 2025: Professor Balandin is a Guest Editor for the special topic issue of the Applied Physics Letters on Inelastic Light Scattering Spectroscopies. This type of spectroscopy probes the properties of materials by analyzing changes in the energies and momenta of incident and scattered light resulting from interactions with excitations within the material, such as phonons and magnons. These techniques provide information about the material’s vibrational, rotational, magnetic, and...
Applied Physics Letters Early Career Outstanding Presentation Award
December 2024: Jordan Teeter, a graduate student researcher in the Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, received an APL Early Career Outstanding Presentation Award for his presentation entitled "The One-Dimensional Atomic Chain Limit in van der Waals Crystals" at the Workshop on Innovative Nanoscale Devices and Systems (WINDS), held at the Fairmont Orchid Hawaii on the Big Island of Hawaii in December 2024. Workshop on Innovative...
New NSF-funded advanced spectroscope enters operation at UCLA
Investigators at UCLA and beyond can gain access to a new, advanced spectroscopy device supported by the National Science Foundation. The Brillouin – Mandelstam Light Scattering Spectroscopy (BMS) Facility, housed at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, makes it possible to analyze extremely small, atomically thin samples across a wide range of temperatures, from cryogenic to above room temperature. With an integrated micro-Brillouin – Mandelstam – Raman spectrometer system,...