Nanometer-scale materials can have unique properties depending on their size and dimensionality and serve as building blocks for a variety of functional systems. For this, it is important to control their structure at all levels from the atomic scale to the integration large scale. Owing to their high surface-to-volume ratio, their surface and their interface with their substrate and matrix can greatly determine their properties as well. We will show how understanding and exploiting these surfaces and interfaces enables us to produce nanomaterials with exquisite control of their structure, geometry, crystallographic orientation, polarity and chirality. This yields novel one-dimensional (1D), two-dimensional (2D) and mixed-dimensional (XD) nanostructures with unique optical, electronic, optoelectronic and magnetic properties, giant magnetoresistance and coherent electron transport through chemically and topologically protected surface states at unusually high temperatures. This allows us to integrate them into devices for many potential applications, from energy harvesting and storage to sensing, logics, and quantum computing.

 

 

Biography and photo:

 

Ernesto Joselevich was born in in Buenos Aires, Argentina, began his undergraduate studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and completed a BSc degree in chemistry summa cum laude at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1989). There, he also obtained his PhD in chemistry (1997), followed by a postdoctoral position at Harvard University (1998-2000). In 2001, he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Materials and Interfaces, recently renamed Department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science, where he is today the Drake Family Professor of Nanotechnology. His research focuses on the formation, structure and properties of low-dimensional materials (including carbon and inorganic nanotubes, nanowires and 2D materials), their characterization by mechanical, electrical, optical and magnetic measurements at the nanometer scale, and their integration into functional nanosystems, such as ultra-miniaturized logic circuits, photodetectors, solar cells, inertial sensors and potential devices for neuromorphic and quantum computing. Prof. Joselevich pioneered the ‘guided growth’ approach for the generation of ordered nanotubes and nanowires directed by surfaces. His group is also leading the field of nanotube torsion, namely, how different nanotubes twist and how the could be used for a variety of sensors, such as miniature gyroscopes to guided tiny autonomous flying vehicles. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Israel Chemical Society Excellent Young Scientist Prize (2007), European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (2014), Tenne Prize for Nanoscale Sciences (2016) and Israel Vacuum Society (IVS) Excellence Award for Research (2020). He has filed 5 patents and published around 100 papers in prestigious journals, 7 of them in Science, Nature, and Nature group journals, with over 10,000 citations (h-index 43). Prof. Joselevich is the proud father of four children aged 22, 20, 16 and 16. He likes giving popular scientific lectures and experiments to children of all ages from 1 to 99. He also likes sports, encyclopedic knowledge, cooking, traveling and meeting people from all over the world. He speaks several languages, including Spanish, Hebrew, English, French, Catalan, Portuguese and a bit of Arabic.