cfaed Distinguished Lecture Series

Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Sir Konstantin S. Novoselov FRS , University of Manchester, UK

Materials in the Flatland

16.09.2016 (Friday) , 16:00 - 17:00
Dülfersaal , Entrance Dülferstraße , 01169 Dresden

Abstract

When one writes by a pencil, thin flakes of graphite are left on a surface. Some of them are only one atom thick and can be viewed as individual atomic planes cleaved away from the bulk. Such one atom thick crystals of graphite (dubbed graphene) turned out to be the strongest crystals available to us, the most conductive, most thermally conductive, most elastic, flexible, transparent material, etc, etc, etc. Its electronic properties are particularly exciting: its quasiparticles are governed by the Dirac equation so that charge carriers in graphene mimic relativistic particles with zero rest mass.
Still, probably the most important “property” of graphene is that it has opened a floodgate of experiments on many other 2D atomic crystals: BN, NbSe2, TaS2, MoS2, etc. The resulting pool of 2D crystals is huge, and they cover a massive range of properties: from the most insulating to the most conductive, from the strongest to the softest.
If 2D materials provide a large range of different properties, sandwich structures made up of 2, 3, 4 … different layers of such materials can offer even greater scope. Since these 2D-based heterostructures can be tailored with atomic precision and individual layers of very different character can be combined together, - the properties of these structures can be tuned to study novel physical phenomena or to fit an enormous range of possible applications, with the functionality of heterostructure stacks is “embedded” in their design.

Everybody is cordially invited!

Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov FRS

Prof. Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS was born in Russia in August 1974. He has both British and Russian citizenship. He is best known for isolating graphene at The University of Manchester in 2004, and is an expert in condensed matter physics, mesoscopic physics and nanotechnology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for his achievements with graphene. Kostya holds positions of Langworthy Professor of Physics and the Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester.

He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his PhD studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to The University of Manchester in 2001. Professor Novoselov has published more than 250 peer-reviewed research papers. He was awarded with numerous prizes, including Nicholas Kurti Prize (2007), International Union of Pure and Applied Science Prize (2008), MIT Technology Review young innovator (2008), Europhysics Prize (2008), Bragg Lecture Prize from the Union of Crystallography (2011), the Kohn Award Lecture (2012), Leverhulme Medal from the Royal Society (2013), Onsager medal (2014) among many others. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours.

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