Reseach Interests
Research direction 1: Preparation of new two-dimensional materials
Human beings always want to understand the ultimate principles of the objective material world, and then obtain the power to change everything. The ancient sages used the way of "poor reason" to understand the truth of all things. Modern scientists use scientific methods to divide our cognition of the material world into many scales and levels. Chemistry is a philosophy, and as our scientific cognition improves, so does our worldview of the scale and level of matter. In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom first discovered graphene, since the dimension has become a new level of our understanding of the world, and two-dimensional materials have become the forefront of materials science in recent years.
The two-dimensional (2D) materials represented by graphene and transition metal disulfide compounds have a thickness of one or several layers of atoms, and the strong quantum limiting effect makes them exhibit many unique and excellent physical and chemical properties such as light, electricity and magnetism. The two-dimensional material has an atomically flat surface, is an ultra-thin single crystal, and scientists can clearly see every atom on the two-dimensional material. Being able to see every atom, for scientists, means seeing the "truth" almost directly, so two-dimensional materials are ideal theoretical research platforms for solving cutting-edge scientific problems such as high-temperature superconductivity, quantum Hall effect, and high-mobility field-effect transistors.
Our research group takes the preparation of two-dimensional materials as the main research direction. Through chemical means, we create a new two-dimensional material material system and study the physical and chemical properties of two-dimensional materials themselves. The novel photophysical and electrophysical properties of two-dimensional materials are explored using devices as carriers. We welcome outstanding young people to join us and further understand our material world with the dimension as the scale.
Research direction 2: Exploration of future carbon materials
Carbon is one of the most important elements on our planet, with an extremely light atomic mass and extremely strong covalent bonds. Carbon is one of the most diverse elements in the periodic table. It can bond with itself or almost all elements in a variety of hybrid ways to obtain a structure-rich carbon network. Many carbon molecules have a unique π-electron conjugation system, and show excellent force, heat, light, electricity and other properties.
Carbon materials have always been considered to be a future material, and even some material scientists believe that human society will enter the future "carbon-based electronic age" from the current "silicon-based electronic age". By adjusting the band gap of carbon materials, it can be made to exhibit different electrical properties (such as metals, semiconductors and insulators), which has a wide range of applications in transistors, energy storage devices, superconductivity and other fields. The preparation of new carbon materials has always been a frontier scientific problem in the field of materials, and every discovery of new carbon materials represented by fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, graphene and graphyne has triggered a research upsurge of materials scientists. In 1985, Robert F. Curl, Jr., Harold Kroto, and Richard E. Smalley discovered C60 (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1996); In 2004, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov successfully isolated graphene from graphite (winning the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics). The properties of carbon materials are closely related to their topological structures, so it is of great significance to study new two-dimensional carbon allotropes, especially new structures with band gaps, and establish the correlation between structure and physical properties.
