Special IMX/ISIC Colloquium - Semiconductor nanowire building blocks: from gate-all-around transistors, nanolasers to photochemical diodes

Wires of different forms have been an integral part of human society for centuries. Electricity is delivered through power lines to every household; information is routinely transmitted through optical fibers, and bridge-building requires mechanically robust cables. Over the past 30 years, scientists have developed a new process for creating nanoscopic wires, which are 1000 times thinner than human hairs, enabling a new generation of computing, integrated photonics, and energy and biomedical technologies.  After several decades of research, semiconductor nanowires with predictable and controlled electrical properties can be synthesized, thus providing optoelectronically-tunable nanoscale building blocks for device assembly for the first time, including nanoscopic lasers, solar cells, gate-all-around silicon nanowire transistors, nanofluidic transistors, intracellular optical and electrical probes,  thermoelectrics, and (bio)photochemical diodes. Nanowires represent an important class of nanostructure building blocks for photovoltaics and direct solar-to-fuel conversion due to their high surface area, tunable bandgap, and efficient charge transport and collection. In this talk, I will present a brief history of nanowire research over the past 30 years and highlight the synthesis of nanowires using well-defined chemical approaches. I will summarize the progress of research in nanowire electronics, photonics, and thermoelectrics. In addition, these semiconductor nanowires, with their unique photoelectrochemical properties, are then utilized for artificial photosynthesis based on a (bio)photochemical diode system design, where solar energy is converted and stored in chemical bonds through a solar-driven CO2 fixation process.

Bio: Peidong Yang is a Chemistry professor, S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair Professor in Energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a senior faculty scientist at the Materials and Chemical Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow.

Prof. Yang is known particularly for his work on semiconductor nanowires and their photonic, electronics, and energy applications, including nanolasers, gate-all-around transistors, and artificial photosynthesis. He is the director of the California Research Alliance by BASF and the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute at Berkeley.  He is an Executive Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Dr. Yang received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Science and Technology in China in 1993. He then received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1997, and did his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Soon after, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the recipient of Global Energy Prize, MacArthur Fellowship, E. O. Lawrence Award, Alan T. Waterman Award, ACS Nanoscience Award, MRS Medal, ACS Baekeland Medal, Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics, Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, MRS Young Investigator Award, ACS Pure Chemistry Award.  He is the 2014 Thomas Reuters Citation Laureate for Physics.