After many months of preparation, the Dimensional Energy team finally gets a chance to test the photothermochemical CO2 conversion reactors as part of the CarbonXprize competition.

Good Luck!

Congrats to Jess for completing her B-exam, and to Yuanze for earning his M.S., both in chemical engineering. Both Jess and Yuanze have made contributions to understanding nanocrystal assemblies.

[update summer 2021, due to COVID the graduation ceremony was delayed, but it was great to reconnect and celebrate the successful PhD! Congrats!]

Congratulations to Jessica and the rest of the team on publishing the 4D-STEM paper in Nano Letters.

The directed assembly of nanoscale building blocks into complex superstructures is of widespread scientific and technological interest. Scientists and engineers have been intrigued by the prospects of tailoring self-assembly processes to create materials whose properties and function can be tuned through the interaction between constituent particles. In particular, recent reports of superlattice structure transformations leading to epitaxially connected nanocrystal superlattices with long-range atomic coherence have generated significant interest as a platform for novel, quasi 2D ‘designer materials’. Although experimental protocols for the formation of high quality superlattices in which constituent nanocrystals are registered to within a single atomic bond length have been established, significant gaps persist in our fundamental understanding of several aspects of the underlying mechanism by which these structures form.

In this article, we apply advanced electron diffraction to investigate the superlattice transformation of lead chalcogenide (PbX, X=S, Se) nanocrystals leading up to 2D oriented attachment. We present unprecedented detail into the exact position and 3D crystallographic alignment of each polyhedral NC in the assembly derived from nanobeam electron diffraction pattern maps acquired with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD). This analysis reveals that the nanocrystals are strongly coupled along the <11n>_AL direction and undergo translation with nearly constant in-plane atomic lattice orientation throughout the transformation. The rich experimental results presented here provide new mechanistic insights into the self-assembly and oriented attachment.

On the 11th of June Yingjie Gao presented her research to the committee and successfully passed her MS exam. Nice work, congratulations!

Tyler made a remote attempt to pass his Admission to Candidacy exam – with success. Congratulations!

Our recent work on the self-assembly of nanoparticles on a glycol surface was accepted for publication in Langmuir. Exciting in situ X-ray scattering experiments done with the amazing Detlef Smilgies at CHESS. It is also Tyler’s first paper, congrats!
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.langmuir.0c00524

Congratulations to Jiyoon Kim for winning the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!!!

Kevin successfully defended his PhD Thesis! Congrats Kevin for an outstanding job. Thanks for the bold and curiosity-driven approach to research which introduced our group to the myriad prospects of pulsed electrochemistry as a novel approach to control product selectivity

First year graduate student Mohshin Suri (ChemE, UT Austin ’19) joins our group to work on photobiocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide. Welcome on board!