The collaborative project between UC Riverside and Stanford explores a recently discovered class of more than 400 materials that form one-dimensional wires of bonded atoms surrounded by a tubular, two-dimensional van der Waals gap avoiding any unsaturated atoms at the wire surface. A combination of predictive computational techniques, chemical preparation, and physical characterization seeks to identify a spectrum of scientifically interesting and technologically relevant properties of these...

Professor Balandin was named a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher in the cross-field category. Highly Cited Researchers are among those who have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple papers, highly cited by their peers over the course of the last decade. These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a chosen field or fields and year in Web of Science. Of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists, the Web of...

Alexander Balandin, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside and Ludwig Bartels, a professor of chemistry, have received a $1.12 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct data-driven discovery, synthesis, and characterization of a unique new class of materials, referred to as one-dimensional van der Waals bonded solids. Balandin serves as a UCR Principal Investigator for this interdisciplinary project. The overall...

Professor Balandin delivered plenary lecture entitled Low-Frequency Noise in Low -Dimensional van der Waals Materials at The International Conference on Noise and Fluctuations (ICNF) in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. ICNF is the most prestigious international conference in the field of noise in electronic materials and devices. This biennial event brings together researchers interested in theoretical and experimental aspects of fluctuations across a wide spectrum of scientific and technological...

Over the summer of 2019, three PhD graduates of Professor Balandin’s Nano-Device Laboratory and Phonon Optimized Engineered Materials (POEM) Center accepted employment with Intel Corporation in Portland. Ece Aytan received her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) with the dissertation entitled “Spin-phonon coupling in antiferromagnetic NiO.” Ruben Salgado’s PhD in MSE dealt with “Electrical and thermal characterization of low-dimensional materials.” The topic of Adane Geremew’s...

Alexander Balandin, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside, has received the Brillouin Medal from the International Phononics Society. The award was presented at the Phononics 2019: 5th International Conference on Phononic Metamaterials, Phonon Transport, and Topological Phononics in Tucson, Arizona, on June 6. Phonons are quanta of crystal lattice vibrations in solid materials, which carry heat and scatter electrons. Phonons reveal themselves in all...

Electronic devices such as transistors are getting smaller and will soon hit the limits of conventional performance based on electrical currents. Devices based on magnonic currents—quasi-particles associated with waves of magnetization, or spin waves, in certain magnetic materials—would transform the industry, though scientists need to better understand how to control them. Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have made an important step toward the development of practical...

The UCR researchers have now found that composites containing the “wonder material” graphene can block EM radiation while dissipating excess heat. “Surprisingly, we discovered that the graphene composites can block EM energy even below the so-called percolation threshold, and remain electrically insulating (which is an important property for a thermal interface material).” Electrical percolation is the term used to describe composites in which electrically conductive filler particles form a...

The UCR team has recently determined that graphene composites reach a distinctive thermal percolation threshold at the loading fraction above 20 vol.%. Thermal percolation is a term used to describe formation of the continuous interconnecting network of fillers, allowing heat to travel mostly via these thermal conductive passes rather than through the matrix. The team established that graphene fillers outperformed boron nitride fillers (h-BN) – another highly thermally conductive material – in...