Professor Jonathan ColemanRead about Professor Jonathan Coleman's proposed talk to be held at Materials Today's New Scientist Live event on 23 September 2016.
Abstract:
In recent years physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers have been getting ever more excited about graphene. The first truly 2-dimensional material, graphene, is found as sheets of carbon, one atom thick but many, many thousands of atoms across. Because of its 2D nature, graphene displays a host of exciting properties: it is the thinnest, strongest, most impermeable and most conductive material known to man. If this wasn’t exciting enough, the discovery of graphene was quickly followed by reports of a host of other 2D materials with exotic names like black phosphorous and silicene. These materials also have unusual properties making the family of 2D nanomaterials the go-to-place for demonstrating nano-applications. Many researchers have been focusing on making 2D materials and finding uses for them. One of our interests is in showing that nanoscience does not have to be difficult. That will be the focus of this talk. I will introduce graphene and other 2D materials before demonstrating how we can not only make them, but fabricate them into useful devices, using (almost) only things found in the kitchen.
Biography:
Jonathan Coleman is the Professor of Chemical Physics in the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin and is a Principle Investigator in the CRANN nanoscience centre. He received both his BA in physics and his PhD from Trinity College. The focus of his research is liquid exfoliation of van der Waals bonded nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene and inorganic layered compounds. Exfoliation of these materials allows them to be processed into functional materials. Coleman’s group works extensively in the areas of printed electronics from 2D materials, solution processed thin films for electrode applications and nanostructured composites for sensing applications. He has published approximately 200 papers in international journals including Nature and Science and has a h-index of 68. He was recently listed by Thomson Reuters among the world’s top 100 materials scientists of the last decade and was named as the Science Foundation Ireland researcher of the Year in 2011.