Seminar Abstract

Designing Nanowires: from Energy Conversion to Novel Quantum Materials

Yi Cui

Stanford University
Materials Science and Engineering

Tuesday, September 22nd 1:25 PM
B-75 Amundson Hall

The capability of synthesizing materials with nanometer size and shape control has enabled exciting opportunities to engineer materials for controlling and understanding electronic, photonic and ionic processes, which are important for applications such as energy conversion and quantum electronics. In this talk I will show three examples on how we design nanowire materials towards high performance energy conversion and new quantum state of matter. In the first example, nanocone- and nanodome- shaped nanowires are designed for efficient photon management, which result in significant improvement of solar cell power efficiency compared to the flat film devices. Second, nanowires are exploited to maximize efficiency of simultaneous electron and ionic insertion with facile strain relaxation, which enable novel ultrahigh charge storage capacity materials towards next generation of high energy density batteries. Third, nanoribbons of metal chalcogenides are shown to have exciting properties of three-dimensional topological insulator, a novel quantum state of matter.