Condensed Matter Seminars

Hydrogen will play an important role as the cleanest energy source in the future. How to produce, transport, and store hydrogen is an important issue. Meanwhile, hydrogen is also an ideal coolant for cooling the high temperature superconductor for power transmission and storage, and also for superfast transit for people and goods. In this presentation, I will discuss the development of efficient catalysts for hydrogen production through water electrolysis, transport and storage, and superfast vehicles traveling at about 400 miles per hour with absolute flexibility and safety.

Ultrahigh thermal conductivity has been constantly pursued for many applications. Diamond has the highest thermal conductivity but is an insulator, silicon and GaAs are good semiconductors used for our daily life but the thermal conductivity is too low, the band gap is not large enough nor the carrier mobility. Boron arsenide was theoretically predicted to have a unique combination of thermal conductivity close to that of diamond, a band gap as large as 2 eV, and equally high mobility in both electrons and holes. In this talk, I will present our progress on boron arsenide single crystals.