Grant provides critical support for university's materials science research

Liz McCue | University Communication and Marketing

Christian Binek (second from right) is principal investigator of a new National Science Foundation-funded program exploring novel two-dimensional materials. Binek is Paula and D.B. Varner Professor of Physics and director of the Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience. Team members on the project are (from left) Xia Hong, professor of physics and astronomy; Abdelghani Laraoui, associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering; Peter Dowben, Charles Bessey Professor of physics and astronomy; and Kirill Belashchenko, professor of physics and astronomy.

University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers will continue their pursuit of novel two-dimensional materials with the aid of a new $1.8 million grant through the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR program.

Long in the forefront of nanoscience, in recent years Husker scientists have increasingly turned their attention to quantum materials — substances where quantum mechanical effects create unusual magnetic and ferroelectric properties.

Often only a single atom or molecular structure thick, many of the substances have been dubbed “flatland” materials because of their nearly two-dimensional structure.

Physicist Christian Binek, director of the Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience and scientific director of Emergent Quantum Materials and Technologies, headed the team of four physicists and a materials and mechanical engineer that was awarded the new four-year grant.

“It is good for UNL and good for material science at UNL, in particular,” he said. “We are at the cutting edge with these two-dimensional materials, which are what people think about when they think about quantum materials.”

The Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience is a research center that provides instrumentation for materials science that can be used by the university, industry and institutions across the country. The center's unique instrumentation includes the first commercial nitrogen vacancy low temperature scanning microscope in the United States.

The grant represents Nebraska’s share of a joint project with University of Kansas scientists called “Harnessing Artificial Magnetic Semiconductors in the Flatland.” The collaboration between the two universities combines their complementary expertise in synthesis, nanofabrication, characterization, sensing and theory to advance the science and device applications of artificial two-dimensional magnetic materials.

It is one of six transformative research and infrastructure enhancement awards, totaling $29.2 million, recently announced by the National Science Foundation.

“These multi-state collaborative teams are tackling real-world research challenges that matter to the citizens of their regions, while also building competitive research environments for the entire nation,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director, in a news release announcing the awards.

Graphene, a two-dimensional material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms first isolated and characterized in 2004, is perhaps the poster child of two-dimensional materials, Binek said, but many more materials are under development.

Strong, flexible and excellent conductors of electricity and heat, the materials have great potential for solving the looming problems of an increasingly electronic world in terms of battery storage and energy consumption, as well as creating even more amazing devices to manage and expand human knowledge and lengthen human life.

“It’s a general trend,” Binek said. “We started with big computers that filled an entire warehouse, then we moved to desktops and smartphones and then smartwatches — you have this enormously powerful computer that you wear on your wrist. You can make very useful things with the materials — electronics flexible enough to be formed into a textile that makes your jacket smart, or thin enough to be a tattoo that monitors your glucose or oxygen.”

Binek, Paula and D.B. Varner Professor of physics, serves as principal investigator for the new grant. Other team members are Peter Dowben, Charles Bessey Professor of physics and astronomy; Kirill Belashcenko, professor of physics and astronomy; Xia Hong, professor of physics and astronomy; and Abdelghani Laraoui, associate professor of mechanical and materials engineering.

The grant was funded through NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, intended to foster research and development in states and territories that have historically received less federal funding.

An important aspect of the EPSCoR grant is that it will help continue the work launched by Emergent Quantum Materials and Technologies, established nearly five years ago with a $20 million NSF grant. The center represents a partnership among four Nebraska universities: the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Creighton University; and two tribal colleges, Little Priest and Nebraska Indian Community College.

Binek said the new EPSCoR grant will assist with maintaining graduate students who form a critical part of the university's scientific workforce and who will become the leading scientists of tomorrow.