Shaping matter at the smallest scale.

As the microelectronics industry moves to adopt Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture in next-generation devices, marked by Apple’s recent announcement that the iPhone 18 will use TSMC’s 2nm GAAFET A20 chip, we want to highlight a landmark contribution from our very own Professor Peidong Yang.

Back in 2006, long before GAAFET became the industry standard for sub-3nm nodes, Professor Yang’s group published pioneering research demonstrating the bottom-up chemical synthesis of gate-all-around silicon nanowire structures (Nano Letters, 2006). Their early proof-of-concept work validated the superior electrostatic control of complete gate-wrapping, helping pave the path for today’s commercial microchip revolution.

“Gate-All-Around Nanowire Field-Effect Transistors: A Historical Perspective”, Lei Tang, Peidong Yang, Nano Lett., 26, 15, 4913–4922 (2026). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6c00466.

It’s amazing to see fundamental chemistry research conducted over 20 years ago shape the future of global tech today! 🔬

Read more about the history and impact of this work. The early research: https://bit.ly/4xSFipw

The tech today: https://bit.ly/4xtxcCM

Berkeley Lab

University of California, Berkeley

Press Release

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has named two prominent faculty members from the College of Chemistry as recipients of its prestigious 2027 National Awards, honoring their pioneering research contributions, scientific leadership, and impact on global sustainability.

They include:

The ACS National Awards celebrate scholars whose discoveries advance the chemical sciences and address critical global challenges in energy, environment, and materials science.

To learn more about the 2027 ACS National Award recipients, read the full announcement in Chemical & Engineering News.

Congratulations! Lihini Jayasinghe has been awarded the 2026-2027 Kavli ENSI Graduate Student Fellowship.

Congratulations! Jihoon has been selected to receive a 2026 Hearts to Humanity Eternal (H2H8) research grant award.

Congratulations to our 12 graduates this year! In addition, congratulations to our graduates who have received prestigious awards/fellowships:

• Maria Fonseca Guzman: 2026 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award, BIDMaP Postdoc fellowship
• Yuxin Jiang: Stanford Science Postdoc Fellowship
• Anna Chen: 2026 Senior Undergraduate Research Award, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
• Skye Leng: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Best of luck in your future endeavors!

UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and Veolia, a global leader in environmental services and resource management headquartered in France, have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to explore a long-term collaboration. This agreement marks the beginning of a shared journey to research and develop ways to detect even the tiniest traces of impurities in water. This is a crucial step for making the advanced chips used in the semiconductor industry.

Veolia will serve as a strategic industry and funding partner within this collaboration framework. On the UC Berkeley side, the initiative will be led by professor of chemistry and materials science Peidong Yang, a chemist and materials scientist whose research lies at the intersection of nanoscience, energy conversion, and synthetic biology. He is internationally recognized for pioneering work in semiconductor nanowires and the design of biohybrid materials that mimic natural photosynthesis.

The team will build custom-designed ‘molecular filters’ to hunt down, measure and capture stubborn pollutants. Unlike current tools, these new materials are engineered at the atomic level to capture even the smallest contaminants, such as TFA—a persistent chemical that escapes traditional cleaning methods. This technology could lead to a new generation of affordable systems that purify our water, air, and soil on a global scale.

“It’s very exciting to be starting this partnership with Veolia,” said Anne Baranger, interim dean of the College of Chemistry. “We have spent 150 years setting the global standard for chemical sciences, and it’s fitting that many of our goals align with Veolia’s. Combining our strengths in energy innovation, carbon capture and sustainability, and water purification, creates a clear synergy.”

By aligning their expertise, the College and industry partners intend to leverage their combined strengths to address water shortage and purity and also open the door for additional innovation at the university-industry interface. While currently in the planning phase, this MOU signifies a formal commitment to working together toward decarbonization, depollution, and resource regeneration. “We look forward to exploring new possibilities and creating meaningful impact in the months and years to come,” said Baranger.

“Veolia is proud to partner with Berkeley on this forward-looking project, which reflects our shared commitment to excellence, continuous innovation, and the fight against pollution. By combining our expertise, we aim to deliver impactful solutions so the key industries can maintain resilient, efficient, and sustainable performance every day,” said Philippe Seberac, Technical and Scientific Director at Veolia.

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and Veolia announce collaborative framework

College of Chemistry Press Release

Link: UC Berkeley College of Chemistry

A new technology has been developed that uses two types of microorganisms in stages to convert carbon dioxide, a major contributor to climate change, into eco-friendly fuel.

The Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) announced on the 28th that Professor Kim Jin-hyun of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in collaboration with a research team from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), has developed a continuous microbial process system that converts carbon dioxide into the eco-friendly fuel butanol. The research findings were published in the international journal ‘Bioresource Technology’ on the 24th of last month (local time).

To mitigate climate change, efforts are ongoing to convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into various useful substances. A process designed for microorganisms to absorb CO2 and produce useful materials through metabolism is eco-friendly and consumes less energy. It also eliminates the need for expensive precious metal catalysts.

The research team created a microbial conversion system that links two microorganisms in stages, much like a factory assembly line. This approach was taken because microorganisms that directly convert carbon dioxide to butanol have low efficiency and are difficult to control, limiting their commercialization.

A “division of labor” was established where an acetogen (*Sporomusa ovata*) consumes carbon dioxide to produce acetic acid (CH3COOH), which is then taken up by *E. coli* to complete the conversion into butanol (C4H9OH).

The team genetically engineered the *E. coli* to increase butanol production efficiency by 3.8 times. Typical *E. coli* do not readily consume acetic acid, and even when they do, they use the resulting energy primarily for survival, leading to poor butanol production efficiency. The researchers modified the bacteria to prefer consuming acetic acid and to channel its energy into producing butanol.

The developed process stably produced butanol for over 90 hours with only carbon dioxide and hydrogen as inputs, requiring no external carbon source. Hydrogen is a material used by the acetogen to create acetic acid. The system produced 4.8 milligrams (mg) of butanol per liter of culture medium per hour.

The research team explained, “While it is not yet economically viable, we have established a foundational and scalable system for converting carbon dioxide into butanol.”

Professor Kim stated, “We have stably linked two continuous culture reactors where raw material supply and product production occur uninterruptedly.” He added, “By increasing microbial metabolic efficiency and optimizing the process, this could become an alternative to replace fossil fuels and accelerate the era of carbon neutrality.”

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Microbial assembly line turns carbon dioxide into butanol fuel

Author: Byeongku Lee

Link: DongA Science

Here’s a novel pathway to a more sustainable planet: carbo-loading for the public good.

In a new study published in Nature Synthesis, chemists at Yale and the University of California-Berkeley have developed a two-step process that removes carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the air and converts it into carbohydrates, aka sugars.

Previous studies from various research institutes, including Yale, have explored ways to convert CO₂ into simple molecules, such as methanol and formate, that can be used as industrial feedstocks for other products and to reduce greenhouse gases.

The new study pushes this idea further. It describes a process for using renewable electricity to transform CO₂ into long-chain carbohydrates (molecules with five or six carbon atoms), which are considered the molecular building blocks of life.

“We were motivated by the successes and limitations of our own previous work,” said Hailiang Wang, a chemistry professor in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, member of the Yale Energy Sciences Institute and Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, and co-corresponding author of the study. “The products we’ve made up to now, such as methanol, are very useful, but we wanted to develop conversions for even more complex and valuable products.”

Wang also has a secondary appointment in materials science at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.

In the new study, Wang and his colleagues begin with an electrochemical reaction that, if left uninterrupted, will convert carbon dioxide into methanol. However, the researchers halt the process in mid-reaction — when the molecule is formaldehyde.

At this point, the researchers convert the formaldehyde molecule into a molecule called hydroxymethanesulfonate (HMS), an organosulfur compound that is stable against further reduction.

“Formaldehyde is so reactive, it is challenging to work with,” Wang said. “But we’ve been able to stabilize it.”

The HMS can then be converted, in a thermochemical reaction, into carbohydrates, such as synthetic sugars for agricultural feedstocks and sweeteners. In addition to these potential uses in agriculture and food production, the new chemical process may have applications in drug design and biotech, Wang said.

Such applications are all in addition to the environmental benefits of disposing of CO₂ — a main contributor to climate change.

The researchers are planning to refine the results with additional research and are pursuing a patent application for the process.

The co-corresponding author of the study, along with Wang, is Peidong Yang of the University of California at Berkeley. The co-lead authors are Jing Li and Kedang Chen of Yale

. Additional co-authors are Nathan Edward Soland of the University of California at Berkeley and Jindou Yang, Yuanzuo Gao, Seonjeong Cheon, and Yuming Su of Yale.

The National Science Foundation, a National Brown Investigator Award, and the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture supported the research.

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Sweetening the deal for sustainability — while removing carbon dioxide

Author: Jim Shelton

Link: Yale news

Key Takeaways

• Berkeley Lab scientists showed a novel way to build advanced transistors decades before similar structures reached smartphones.
• Their bottom-up approach crafted transistors at 2-nanometer scale through chemical synthesis.
• As smartphone chips shrink ever smaller, this pioneering approach could help solve tomorrow’s manufacturing challenges.

As the microelectronics industry moves to adopt gate-all-around transistor designs in next-generation smartphones, groundbreaking research from nearly 20 years ago at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) demonstrated an innovative approach to creating these advanced structures.

The technology – called gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAA-FET) – represents a key architectural advance for packing billions more transistors into the tiny microchips that are found in smartphones and laptops. The “gate-all-around” design enhances control over the transistor channel, leading to better performance and lower power consumption. While industry is now implementing GAA-FET through traditional top-down fabrication, Berkeley Lab’s early bottom-up approach showed the potential of this geometry using chemical synthesis to achieve these complex structures.

“I’m pleased to see the continued evolution of transistor architectures in the semiconductor industry,” said Peidong Yang, who published work on bottom-up synthesis of gate-all-around structures in a pioneering paper in 2006. “Our early exploration of chemical synthesis approaches to creating complex transistor geometries demonstrated alternative pathways for fabricating these structures.” Yang is a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

Transistors are the fundamental building blocks of modern computing – and some of the best-performing microchips in smartphones today consist of more than 10 billion of them, each just 5 nanometers in size. Each transistor acts like a switch, allowing or blocking the flow of current through a semiconductor channel, enabling the binary operations that underpin modern computing.

A transistor’s gate is the control input that determines whether the transistor is on or off. For the past decade, the most common transistor design was the FinFET (Fin Field-Effect Transistor), which positioned the semiconductor channel vertically, like a fin on a tiny surfboard, with the gate wrapping around it on three sides. Shrinking the FinFET below 5 nanometers, however, reduces gating and energy efficiency.

Microchip manufacturers want to continue pushing the limits of Moore’s Law by packing tens of billions more transistors into a chip no bigger than the size of a fingernail. A higher transistor density would require even smaller transistors – down to 2 nanometers (the size of a DNA strand) or, more ambitiously, the size of a few silicon atoms (1 nanometer). Smaller chips means smaller devices and can also make chips more energy-efficient.

The microelectronics industry has known for decades that the gate-all-around approach – a design concept that wraps the gate all the way around the channel – could potentially make a higher-performing, more efficient transistor at sub-5-nanometer scales. While traditional top-down lithography faced technical challenges in fabricating GAA-FET geometries in the early 2000s, researchers were exploring various approaches and structures to realize this design concept.

In a scientific first, the Yang group demonstrated an unconventional bottom-up approach to creating silicon-based, gate-all-around transistors using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). In their seminal 2006 paper in Nano Letters, “Silicon Vertically Integrated Nanowire Field Effect Transistors,” Yang and team used CVD to grow vertical silicon nanowires coated with an ultrathin metallic layer and embedded in silicon dioxide. This achieved a gate-all-around structure using industry-standard materials, but through chemical synthesis rather than traditional lithography.

The device properties of these bottom-up silicon-nanowire transistors rivaled those of standard transistors at the time. In recent years, microchip manufacturers have moved to embrace the gate-all-around concept, achieving the architecture through top-down fabrication approaches.

“It’s fascinating to see how semiconductor technology has evolved over the past two decades,” Yang said. “Our early work exploring different approaches to transistor design was part of the broader research community’s efforts to advance microelectronics.”

Yang’s work demonstrated the fundamental viability of the GAA-FET architecture when many in the field considered it merely theoretical. By successfully creating functional gate-all-around structures through CVD, the Berkeley Lab team validated the superior electrostatic control that would later become the primary motivation for industry adoption. This early proof-of-concept work helped establish that complete gate wrapping could indeed deliver the performance improvements that theory predicted, providing confidence for the substantial R&D investments that followed.

 

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Early Research Demonstrated Novel Approach to Next-Generation Transistor Design

Author: Theresa Duque and Alison Hatt

Link: Berkeley Lab News

Congratulations! Julian Feijoo has been awarded for his presentation at the ACS Fall 2025 meeting.

As the microelectronics industry moves to adopt gate-all-around transistor designs in next-generation smartphones, groundbreaking research at Berkeley Lab demonstrated an innovative approach to creating these advanced structures nearly 20 years ago.

The technology – called gate-all-around field-effect transistors (GAA-FET) – represents a key architectural advance for packing billions more transistors into the tiny microchips that are found in smartphones and laptops. The “gate-all-around” design enhances control over the transistor channel, leading to better performance and lower power consumption. While industry is now implementing GAA-FET through traditional top-down fabrication, Berkeley Lab’s early bottom-up approach showed the potential of this geometry using chemical synthesis to achieve these complex structures.

 

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Compute This: Six Ways Berkeley Lab Is Shaping the Future of Microelectronics

Author: Theresa Duque and Alison Hatt

Link: Berkeley Lab News

Congratulations! Amelyn Phang received the NSF GRF award for her graduate study at Caltech.

 

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Operando imaging reveals nanocatalyst reconstruction

Author: Debangshu Mukerjee

Link: Nature Catalysis News & Views

Congratulations! Alex Sachelarie has been awarded the 2025 Glenn T. Seaborg award.

 

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) along with international collaborators have brought us one step closer to harnessing the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuel and other valuable chemicals. In a recent publication in Nature Catalysis, the researchers debut a self-contained carbon-carbon (C2) producing system that combines the catalytic power of copper with perovskite, a material used in photovoltaic solar panels. This advance builds on over 20 years of research and brings the scientific community one step closer to replicating the productivity of a green leaf in nature.

This work is part of a larger initiative, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), which is a Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Led by Caltech in close partnership with Berkeley Lab, LiSA brings together more than 100 scientists from national lab partners at SLAC and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and university partners at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and the University of Oregon. Researchers involved in this multi-institutional collaboration have made advances in developing our understanding of and the tools needed to develop liquid fuels generated from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. (Learn more about the LiSA collaboration in this roundup, “Five Ways LiSA is Advancing Solar Fuels.”)

“Nature was our inspiration,” said Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering involved in the published work. “We had to work on the individual components first, but when we brought everything together and realized that it was successful, it was a very exciting moment.”

To build a system that mimics photosynthesis, Yang and his team followed the natural processes that occur in the leaf of a plant. Each individual component of a leaf’s photosynthesizing elements had to be replicated and refined. Tapping into the decades’ worth of research, the scientists used lead halide perovskite photoabsorbers to imitate a leaf’s light-absorbing chlorophyll. And inspired by enzymes that regulate photosynthesis in nature, they designed electrocatalysts made of copper that resemble tiny flowers.

Previous experiments have successfully replicated photosynthesis through the use of biological materials, but this work incorporated an inorganic material, copper. While the selectivity of copper is lower than biological alternatives, the inclusion of copper presents a more durable, stable, and longer-lasting option for the artificial leaf system design.

Work led by researchers in the LiSA project developed the cathode and anode components of the new device. Instruments at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry allowed Yang’s team to integrate the device with metal contacts. During the experiments in Yang’s lab, a solar simulator mimicking a consistently bright sun was used to test the selectivity of the new device.

Prior innovations across research groups enabled an organic oxidation reaction to take place in the photoanode chamber and created C2 products in the photocathode chamber. This breakthrough created a realistic artificial-leaf architecture in a device about the size of a postage stamp – it converts CO₂ into a C2 molecule using only sunlight.

The C2 chemicals produced from this device are precursory ingredients for many industries that produce valuable products in our everyday lives – from plastic polymers to fuel for larger vehicles that can’t yet run off a battery, like an airplane. Building upon this fundamental research milestone, Yang is now aimed to increase the system’s efficiency and expand the size of the artificial leaf to begin increasing the scalability of the solution.

 

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Scientists Develop Artificial Leaf That Uses Sunlight to Produce Valuable Chemicals

Author: Ashleigh Papp

Link: Berkeley Lab News

Congratulations! Our new postdoctoral fellow, Mihail Krumov, has been awarded the 2025 Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellowship from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. Mihail will join our group starting July 1, 2025.

Congratulations! Julian Feijoo has been awarded the silver prize of the 2025 Spring MRS Graduate Student Award.

Tiny copper ‘nano-flowers’ have been attached to an artificial leaf to produce clean fuels and chemicals that are the backbone of modern energy and manufacturing.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons—molecules made of carbon and hydrogen—powered solely by the sun.

The device they developed combines a light absorbing ‘leaf’ made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a copper nanoflower catalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert CO₂ into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene—key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals and plastics.

Almost all hydrocarbons currently stem from fossil fuels, but the method developed by the Cambridge-Berkeley team results in clean chemicals and fuels made from CO₂, water and glycerol—a common organic compound—without any additional carbon emissions. The results are reported in the journal Nature Catalysis.

The study builds on the team’s earlier work on artificial leaves, which take their inspiration from photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert sunlight into food.

“We wanted to go beyond basic carbon dioxide reduction and produce more complex hydrocarbons, but that requires significantly more energy,” said Dr. Virgil Andrei from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the study’s lead author.

Andrei, a Research Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, carried out the work as part of the Winton Cambridge-Kavli ENSI Exchange program in the lab of Professor Peidong Yang at University of California, Berkeley.

By coupling a perovskite light absorber with the copper nanoflower catalyst, the team was able to produce more complex hydrocarbons. To further improve efficiency and overcome the energy limits of splitting water, the team added silicon nanowire electrodes that can oxidize glycerol instead. This new platform produces hydrocarbons much more effectively—200 times better than earlier systems for splitting water and carbon dioxide.

The reaction not only boosts CO₂ reduction performance but also produces high-value chemicals such as glycerate, lactate, and formate, which have applications in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and chemical synthesis.

“Glycerol is typically considered waste, but here it plays a crucial role in improving the reaction rate,” said Andrei. “This demonstrates we can apply our platform to a wide range of chemical processes beyond just waste conversion. By carefully designing the catalyst’s surface area, we can influence what products we generate, making the process more selective.”

While current CO₂-to-hydrocarbon selectivity remains around 10%, the researchers are optimistic about improving catalyst design to increase efficiency.

The team envisions applying their platform to even more complex organic reactions, opening doors for innovation in sustainable chemical production. With continued improvements, this research could accelerate the transition to a circular, carbon-neutral economy.

“This project is an excellent example of how global research partnerships can lead to impactful scientific advancements,” said Andrei. “By combining expertise from Cambridge and Berkeley, we’ve developed a system that may reshape the way we produce fuels and valuable chemicals sustainably.”

 

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Tiny copper ‘flowers’ bloom on artificial leaves for clean fuel production

Author: University of Cambridge

Link: phys.org

Congratulations! Our alumni, Cheng Zhu, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Kavli Thesis Prize. Cheng’s thesis presents an innovative supramolecular assembly strategy for designing metal halide perovskites by manipulating metal-halide complexes. The first section highlights the construction of charge-neutral (crown ether@A)₂MX₆ motifs, formed from crown ethers and double perovskite A₂MX₆, which assemble into hexagonal single crystals. In the second part, Cheng demonstrates near-unity photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) blue emission from the supramolecular assembly of [HfBr₆]^2- octahedral centers, a less explored configuration. Notably, (18C6@K)₂HfBr₆ solid powders exhibit a PLQY of 96.22%. Additionally, efficient green emission (82.69% PLQY) is achieved due to the high tunability of the dumbbell structural unit. The solution-processable nature of these materials enables their use in thin film and 3D printing applications. Cheng’s research further expands the supramolecular approach to the one-dimensional (1D) molecular wire regium, with potential applications in miniaturized molecular optoelectronic devices. This work paves the way for significant advancements in both supramolecular assembly and nanomaterials research.

Since its launch in 2020, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance has enabled progress in artificial photosynthesis – including advances in device performance, materials durability, and computational modeling.

Artificial photosynthesis could one day harness energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water into liquid fuels to power your car, and enable a process for creating chemicals and fertilizers that is better for the environment. But scientists first need new techniques to efficiently convert sunlight into solar fuels and chemicals at scale, and store them for later use.

Since its founding in 2020, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA) – a Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub funded by the U.S. Department of Energy – has made advances in developing the science principles by which liquid fuels can be generated from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water.

“LiSA is bringing solar fuels closer to reality. In just five years our researchers have achieved major milestones in artificial photosynthesis.”

– Joel Ager, senior scientist and LiSA program lead at Berkeley Lab

Led by Caltech in close partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), LiSA brings together more than 100 scientists from national lab partners at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and university partners at UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and the University of Oregon. This multi-institutional collaboration is focused on accelerating advances in solar fuels research by combining computationally driven experimentation with real-time observations using ultrafast X-rays and other advanced imaging techniques. By facilitating a national network of leading research capabilities, advanced instruments, and cutting-edge user facilities that are unique to national labs and universities, LiSA is paving the way for a solar fuels future.

Paving the Way for a Solar Fuels Future

“LiSA is bringing solar fuels closer to reality,” said Joel Ager, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division who manages the Northern California LiSA facility at Berkeley Lab. “In just five years our researchers have achieved major milestones in artificial photosynthesis, from new materials and devices that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethylene and other chemical fuels, to advances in computer modeling, data visualization, and X-ray imaging techniques that could make the conversion process more efficient and durable at the commercial scale.”

Here are five potential breakthroughs LiSA research teams led by Berkeley Lab have achieved so far.

1. Made solar energy available 24/7

Photoelectrochemical devices use sunlight to trigger chemical reactions that convert CO₂ and water into liquid fuels. This artificial photosynthesis technology has the potential to revolutionize our energy infrastructure, but current photoelectrochemical techniques in CO₂ reduction are limited by sluggish chemical processes and high energy requirements. A project led by Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, offers an alternative approach: A new system design that is far less energy-demanding than conventional systems. This new design enabled 24/7 operation over multiple days – and effectively eliminated sunlight intermittency issues – by using silicon nanowire components that can be illuminated by renewably powered and superefficient LEDs.

2. Modeled artificial photosynthesis at multiple scales

Photoelectrochemical systems have the potential to produce hydrogen fuel and other liquid fuels through artificial photosynthesis, but manufacturing these fuels at scale will require improved efficiencies and product purity. In recent projects led by Adam Weber, senior scientist and head of the Energy Conversion Group in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area, and Alexis Bell, faculty senior scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division, researchers developed and ran models to simulate how molecules, atoms, and electrons move around inside and at the interface of a photoelectrochemical device. These simulations shed light on the importance of ion transport – the movement of charged particles – in membrane materials and catalyst performance. The work also advanced new approaches to designing photoelectrochemical assemblies, including metal-insulator-semiconductor architectures, for CO₂ reduction.

3. Clarified the fundamentals of corrosion: How are ions born?

A project led by Shannon Boettcher, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division, and Martin Head-Gordon, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, has created a validated molecular model which accurately delineates the rates at which ions – chemical species that carry electrical current in solutions – are created when a material rusts and dissolves. The advance will help researchers understand the fundamentals of corrosion in photoelectrochemical devices, a longstanding challenge to the commercialization of artificial photosynthesis. The model also maps out the rates at which ions are consumed at the interface between a solid and a liquid, such as when metals are plated from a solution to fabricate semiconductor chips.

By combining laboratory experiments with leading-edge computation, the team’s collaborative study revealed the sequence of molecular events and the resulting barriers that control how fast ions can be formed or consumed. The researchers are currently expanding the approach to complex systems: The aim is to create a general theory that is of broad importance to electrochemical technology in renewable liquid fuel synthesis, batteries, and controlling corrosion processes.

The experimental work was completed at the University of Oregon, a partnering LiSA institution where Boettcher was a chemistry and biochemistry professor before joining Berkeley Lab.

4. Developed superfast X-ray techniques to observe a cutting-edge catalyst at work in real time

Copper is one of the best catalysts in artificial photosynthesis for converting CO₂ into liquid fuels like ethanol, ethylene, and propanol. Researchers have wanted to improve the efficiency and product yield of these reactions, but observing them under operando or real-world working conditions at the interface between metal and electrolyte has been a challenge. A project led by Junko Yano, a senior scientist and Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division Director at Berkeley Lab, could enable the operando characterization of chemical reactions that take place where metal and electrolyte meet. Using X-ray beamlines at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource and Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, the team is developing and applying techniques to determine where chemical reactions take place in active sites of a copper-liquid interface at relevant time scales. The work can enable new insight related to the catalytic mechanism and durability issues in artificial photosynthesis systems.

5. Discovered new materials for solar-driven CO₂ conversion to fuels and chemicals

Photoelectrochemical devices for solar fuels applications rely on the reactions occurring on semiconductor surfaces under illumination. However, many otherwise promising semiconductors are not conducive for the desired CO₂ reduction chemistry due to underperformance in chemical stability and selectivity. Recent work by Joel Ager and his research team discovered two ways to overcome these challenges. First, they showed that an appropriately chosen metal oxide film can both protect the semiconductor from corrosion while allowing electrons to flow to a catalyst, allowing for solar-driven synthesis of ethylene from CO₂.

Next, his team showed that Cu(InGa)S₂ or CIGS – a material used in the photovoltaic industry, but previously overlooked for solar fuels – can convert CO₂ to chemicals like carbon monoxide and formic acid all by itself, without any need for protective coatings or co-catalysts. This work was in collaboration with teams from imec Belgium and the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab. These breakthroughs point to the vast potential of solar-driven CO₂ conversion and open new research avenues for exploration.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

 

Original title: Five Ways LiSA is Advancing Solar Fuels

Author: Theresa Duque

Link: Berkeley Lab News

Recently, a handful of “climate innovators” were identified as a part of Berkeley’s ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship to combat climate change. Among them was Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry and of materials science and engineering.

Yang is creating biohybrid systems that mimic the natural process of photosynthesis, absorbing sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO₂) to provide clean and renewable liquid fuel. Because sunlight isn’t always available, his team is identifying ways to store renewable energy into chemical bonds. One idea is to use sunlight to create chemical fuels that can be stored and used later. This process, known as photoelectrochemical CO₂ reduction, could help us store energy and reduce carbon emissions.

Today his team has taken a first step by looking at ways to achieve carbon neutrality. We know that carbon neutrality would not only avoid the worst consequences of climate change – it also brings benefits to communities and society as a whole including less pollution, health improvements, and the creation of green jobs.

But breaking down CO₂ – removing harmful chemicals – can be tricky because it has such strong bonds. While humans have created many catalysts to help with this, nature’s methods, developed over millions of years, are still the most effective.

One such “natural” system combines bacteria with silicon nanowires. When red light hits the silicon nanowires, it produces electrons that help the bacteria, Sporomusa ovata, convert CO₂ into a substance called acetate.

His team designed a special device that uses a combination of a photocathode and a photoanode. This device only needs low-intensity red light (much weaker than normal sunlight) to work, making it functional even in low-light conditions like in the winter or during early morning and late evening. This setup allows the device to continuously convert CO₂ into useful chemicals, day and night. His findings have been published in Nature Catalysis

This innovation could help reduce CO₂ emissions and produce valuable chemicals for a sustainable future.

Read the full article here.

 

Original title: Red Light-Powered Device for CO₂ Fixation

Author: Veronica Bartell

Link: College of Chemistry News

TSMC announced that it is starting trial production of its gate-all-around 2 nm technology, to be used in the Apple iPhone 17 lineup. Check out our first surrounding gate sub-5nm silicon nanowire transistor, published in 2006 (J. Goldberger et al., Nano Lett. 6, 973, 2006), a prototypical device concept for the Gate-All-Around 3nm/2nm nanowire/nanoribbon transistor technology.

Article link: Econotimes

Congratulations! Our postdoc alumni, Dr. Pengcheng Chen (now an Assistant Professor at Fudan University, China), has been awarded the 2024 MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 in China.

June 26, 2024 – Polyelemental materials exhibit intriguing properties across various domains, including catalysis, structural materials, and optoelectronic devices. Understanding mixing behaviors such as alloying and phase separation is important for correlating the structure and properties of these materials. Specifically, scaling down polyelemental materials to the nanoscale can significantly alter their physical and chemical characteristics. Now, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peidong Yang and Kristin A. Persson, have systematically investigated the mixing behavior of the typically immiscible Au and Rh elements in nanoparticles ranging from 1 to 4 nm in size. They published their study in a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-024-01626-0).

 

Original title: Alloying and phase separation explored in Au–Rh nanoparticles

Author: Nabojit Kar

Link: MRS Bulletin

Congratulations! Yuxin Jiang won the best poster award at GRC (Gordon Research Conferences): Unconventional semiconductors and their applications.

Congratulations! Wei-Shan Huynh received the NSF GRFP award for his graduate study.

March 28, 2024 – At the bulk scale, gold and rhodium separate like oil and water, but at the nanoscale, they can mix completely. The reason for the miscibility is not what it seems.

Phase diagrams change at the nanoscale. When particles are shrunk down to small-enough sizes, the fraction of atoms on the surface increases, and the free-energy balance of atomic interactions changes. Although that has been common knowledge in the nanoscience community for decades, the details have remained fuzzy. Now Peidong Yang of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues have filled in some of those gaps by documenting the nanoscale phase transition of gold–rhodium mixtures down to the 1–5 nm range. In particles as small as 3.8 nm, the metals remain mostly separate. But, as shown in the figure, below 2 nm the thermodynamic balance shifts, and an alloy forms.

The reason the community had been missing that experimental data, explains Yang, is that it’s difficult to systematically produce nanoparticles of 1–5 nm. And once they’ve been made, analyzing their mixing state is also a challenge. Such small particles are easily knocked out of place by the electron beams used to image them. To deal with that challenge, the researchers used a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) at low energies and a random-walk algorithm that measures the domain size and distribution of the gold in the samples.

Gold and rhodium have several qualities that made them an appealing pair to investigate. Nanoparticles of those elements are already used for electrocatalysis reactions, such as the separation of water to make hydrogen fuel. Both elements have cubic lattice structures, so the analysis wouldn’t have to account for structural differences. And gold’s relatively high atomic number, 79, makes it stand out from rhodium, with an atomic number of 45, in the STEM imaging used.

In addition to looking at the effects of particle size, the researchers investigated how different mixing ratios of the two metals affected the results. They found that a 50-50 composition of the elements was the most resistant to mixing. After building a detailed experiment-based phase diagram for the metals’ miscibility, the researchers turned to thermodynamic models to confirm their findings. But they saw a problem: Model after model came back in disagreement with what they had observed. Instead of the evenly mixed alloys they measured, thermodynamic simulations suggested that small nanoparticles of the metals should separate into a core of rhodium surrounded by a shell of gold.

The apparent conflict between theory and observation revealed a piece of the picture the researchers had missed. Polymers used in the nanoparticle synthesis process left behind remnants, such as carbon atoms, that had attached to the surface of the metals. Those remnants, undetectable in the STEM images, changed the nanoparticle’s surface energy. Once the effects of surface passivation were accounted for, thermodynamic models finally agreed with the experimental phase diagram. Only nanoparticles synthesized in UHV would form the core-shell structure that the models predicted. (P.-C. Chen et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. 2024, doi:10.1038/s41565-024-01626-0.)

 

Original title: When unmixable metals mix

Author: Laura Fattaruso

Link: Physics Today

January 31, 2024 – Researchers in the United States have developed a new 3D-printable crystalline material suitable for fabricating highly photoluminescent display components (Science, doi:10.1126/science.adi4196). They believe the technology, dubbed “supramolecular ink,” could one day power organic LED (OLED) displays and wearable devices.

Cheaper, brighter metals

During the material’s assembly process, a solution of crown ether—a ring-shaped organic molecule with a strong affinity for cations—guides metal-halide ionic octahedron units of halide perovskites into novel crystal structures. The supramolecular ink consists of powders containing the transition metals hafnium and zirconium, which are more abundant in Earth’s crust and therefore less expensive than rare metals such as iridium, used in some OLEDs.

The process of assembling the supramolecular ink also makes the tiny optoelectronic structures shine brightly in the blue and green regions of the spectrum. Hafnium makes the perovskites emit blue light with a photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 96.2%, while the zirconium-containing green emitters have a PLQY of 82.7%.

Inside OLEDs

Although OLEDs primarily consist of organic substances, most of them also have a metal component, says Cheng Zhu, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of scientist Peidong Yang’s research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For example, those that contain iridium belong to a group called organometallic chelates.

Some scientists have tried to incorporate aluminum into OLEDs because of its abundance and low cost, but the resulting substances cannot give off blue light and cannot be tuned, Zhu says. As far as the researchers can tell, this is the first time that hafnium has been used as a metal center for OLED structures.

Once the perovskites were properly assembled, the researchers incorporated them into 3D-printing ink. To avoid interference with the blue and green emitters, the ink contained a photoabsorber-free resin made mainly from photomonomer poly (ethylene glycol) diacrylate but with a high content of photoinhibitor to control the printing resolution. The perovskite powder particles were sufficiently small that they did not affect the quality of the printed structures.

According to Zhu, the team was excited that the blue emitters had near-unity PLQY, a characteristic that he explained demonstrates their exceptional ability to convert nearly all absorbed light into visible light during the emission process. “Blue emitters with near-unity PLQY are very rare and challenging to achieve. We immediately realized that we discovered something special.”

The right recipe

To demonstrate the material’s color tunability and luminescence as an OLED emitter, the researchers fabricated a thin-film display prototype from the composite ink and found that the material is suitable for programmable electronic displays.

According to Zhu, finding the right recipe to synthesize the emitters was the greatest challenge because they had to perfect the solvent concentration, temperature and precursor molecules. (The process of assembling the new material can take place at room temperature up to about 80°C.)

Next, the team wants to explore the potential of using the supramolecular ink for creating lights powered by electricity, Zhu says. Integrating the ink into commercial products will require refinement of large-scale production processes for the material.

 

Original title: Affordable, Printable Photoluminescent Material

Author: Patricia Daukantas

Link: Optics and Photonics News, Optica

Berkeley, CA, January 22, 2024 – A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed “supramolecular ink,” a new technology for use in OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays or other electronic devices. Made of inexpensive, Earth-abundant elements instead of costly scarce metals, supramolecular ink could enable more affordable and environmentally sustainable flat-panel screens and electronic devices.

“By replacing precious metals with Earth-abundant materials, our supramolecular ink technology could be a game changer for the OLED display industry,” said principal investigator Peidong Yang, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “What’s even more exciting is that the technology could also extend its reach to organic printable films for the fabrication of wearable devices as well as luminescent art and sculpture,” he added.

“By replacing precious metals with Earth-abundant materials, our supramolecular ink technology could be a game changer for the OLED display industry.” – Peidong Yang

If you have a relatively new smartphone or flat panel TV, there’s a good chance it features an OLED screen. OLEDs are rapidly expanding in the display market because they are lighter, thinner, use less energy, and have better picture quality than other flat-panel technologies. That’s because OLEDs contain tiny organic molecules that emit light directly, eliminating the need for the extra backlight layer that is found in a liquid crystal display (LCD). However, OLEDs can include rare, expensive metals like iridium.

But with the new material – which the Berkeley Lab team recently described in a new study published in the journal Science – electronics display manufacturers could potentially adopt a cheaper fabrication process that also requires far less energy than conventional methods.

The new material consists of powders containing hafnium (Hf) and zirconium (Zr) that can be mixed in solution at low temperatures – from room temperature up to around 176 degrees Fahrenheit (80 degrees Celsius) – to form a semiconductor “ink.”

Tiny molecular “building block” structures within the ink self-assemble in solution – a process that the researchers call supramolecular assembly. “Our approach can be compared to building with LEGO blocks,” said Cheng Zhu, the co-first author on the paper and a Ph.D. candidate in materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. These supramolecular structures enable the material to achieve stable and high-purity synthesis at low temperatures, explained Zhu. He developed the material while working as a research affiliate in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and graduate student researcher in the Peidong Yang group at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

Spectroscopy experiments at UC Berkeley revealed that the supramolecular ink composites are highly efficient emitters of blue and green light – two signifiers of the material’s potential application as an energy-efficient OLED emitter in electronic displays and 3D printing.

Subsequent optical experiments revealed that the blue- and green-emitting supramolecular ink compounds exhibit what scientists call near-unity quantum efficiency. “This demonstrates their exceptional ability to convert nearly all absorbed light into visible light during the emission process,” Zhu explained.

To demonstrate the material’s color tunability and luminescence as an OLED emitter, the researchers fabricated a thin-film display prototype from the composite ink. In an exciting result, they found that the material is suitable for programmable electronic displays.

“The alphabet movie serves as a compelling example that illustrates the application of emissive thin films like supramolecular ink in the creation of fast-switching displays,” said Zhu.

Additional experiments at UC Berkeley showed that the supramolecular ink is also compatible with 3D printing technologies such as for the design of decorative OLED lighting.

Zhu added that manufacturers could also use the supramolecular ink to fabricate wearable devices or high-tech clothing that illuminates for safety in low-light conditions, or wearable devices that display information through the supramolecular light-emitting structures.

The supramolecular ink is another demonstration from the Peidong Yang lab of new sustainable materials that could enable cost-effective and energy-efficient semiconductor manufacturing. Last year, Yang and his team reported a new “multielement ink” – the first “high-entropy” semiconductor that can be processed at low temperature or room temperature.

With their demonstrated stability and shelf life, the supramolecular ink compounds could also help in the commercial advancement of ionic halide perovskites, a thin-film solar material that the display industry has been eyeing for decades. With their low-temperature synthesis in solution, ionic halide perovskites could potentially enable cheaper manufacturing processes for the manufacturing of displays. But high-performance halide perovskites contain the element lead, which is concerning for the environment and public health. In contrast, the new supramolecular ink – which belongs to the ionic halide perovskite family – offers a lead-free formulation without compromising performance.

Now that they have successfully demonstrated the supramolecular ink’s potential in OLED thin films and 3D-printable electronics, the researchers are now exploring the material’s electroluminescent potential. “This involves a focused and specialized investigation into how well our materials can emit light using electrical excitation,” Zhu said. “This step is essential to understanding our material’s full potential for creating efficient light-emitting devices.”

 

Other authors on the study include Jianbo Jin (co-first author), Zhen Wang, Zhenpeng Xu, Maria C. Folgueras, Yuxin Jiang, Can B. Uzundal, Han K.D. Le, Feng Wang, and Xiaoyu (Rayne) Zheng.

This work was supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The technology is available for licensing or collaborative research through Berkeley Lab’s Intellectual Property Office. Contact ipo@lbl.gov for more information.

 

Original title: Scientists Advance Affordable, Sustainable Solution for Flat-Panel Displays and Wearable Tech

Author: Theresa Duque, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Link: Berkeley Lab News Center

January 12, 2024 – By stabilising perovskites in a supramolecular assembly, US researchers have produced effective photoluminescent materials that can be formulated into thin films and 3D printer inks. The supramolecular approach simplifies the synthesis of the perovskites and could open the door to their wider use in light-emitting devices.

A research team led by University of California, Berkeley materials scientist Peidong Yang has created supramolecular assemblies using crown ethers and hafnium and zirconium-containing perovskites. The perovskites feature octahedral metal centres of hafnium or zirconium bound to six halide anions. These materials would usually be highly air and moisture sensitive, but the use of crown ethers stabilises them, allowing for a much simpler synthesis protocol. Yang’s team developed a solution-based synthesis taking place at 200°C, in comparison to the solid-state reactions performed at 1000°C that have previously been required to produce these types of perovskites.

Depending on whether a hafnium or zirconium perovskite is used, the supramolecular assemblies emit either blue or green light. The solid powders show an impressive 96% photoluminescence efficiency with longer photoluminescence lifetimes than other halide perovskite systems. The team produced 3D printer inks using the materials by dispersing them in non-polar solvents. Dissolving polystyrene in the inks enhanced their processability. The team then used the inks to produce various structures, including miniature light-emitting Eiffel Towers.

Original title: Photoluminescent 3D printer inks made with crown-ether-stabilised perovskites

Author: Jamie Duranni

Link: Chemistry World

Science Editor’s Summary — Many inorganic perovskites can show strong photoluminescence, including ones based on hafnium and zirconium halides, but these compounds are often air and water-sensitive. Zhu et al. extend a crown ether–assisted supramolecular assembly approach to guide and stabilize the assembly of octahedral [HfBr₆]^2– octahedral centers. Solid powders of (18C6@K)₂HfBr₆ exhibited 96% photoluminescence quantum yield for blue emission, and a zirconium analog had a photoluminescence quantum yield of 83% for green emission. Addition of a polymer-created solution‐processable inks for printing luminescent thin films and structures. — PDS

Check the full publication here: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi4196

Congratulations! Maria Fonseca Guzman and Yuxin Jiang have been awarded the 2024-2025 Kavli ENSI Philomathia Graduate Student Fellowship.

Congratulations! Arifin won the 1^st prize in the poster presentation category during the CARA-BASF Fall 2023 Review Meeting in UC Santa Barbara, Oct. 18-20.

Berkeley, CA, September 28, 2023 – Semiconductors are the heart of almost every electronic device. Without semiconductors, our computers would not be able to process and retain data; and LED (light-emitting diode) lightbulbs would lose their ability to shine.

But semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of energy. Forming semiconductor materials from sand (silicon oxide) consumes a significant amount of heat-intensive energy, at scorching temperatures of around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. And the process of purifying and assembling all the raw materials that go into making a semiconductor can take weeks if not months.

A new semiconducting material called “multielement ink” could make that process significantly less heat-intensive and more sustainable. Developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, “multielement ink” is the first “high-entropy” semiconductor that can be processed at low temperature or room temperature. The breakthrough was recently reported in the journal Nature.

“The traditional way of making semiconductor devices is energy-intensive and one of the major sources of carbon emissions,” said Peidong Yang, the senior author on the study. Yang is a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “Our new method of making semiconductors could pave the way for a more sustainable semiconductor industry.”

The advance takes advantage of two unique families of semiconducting materials: hard alloys made of high-entropy semiconductors; and a soft, flexible material made of crystalline halide perovskites.

High-entropy materials are solids made of five or more different chemical elements that self-assemble in near-equal proportions into a single system. For many years, researchers have wanted to use high-entropy materials to develop semiconducting materials that self-assemble with minimal energy inputs.

“But high-entropy semiconductors have not been studied to nearly the same extent. Our work could help to significantly fill in that gap of understanding,” said Yuxin Jiang, co-first author and graduate student researcher in the Peidong Yang group with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the department of chemistry at UC Berkeley.

Although conventional high-entropy alloy materials require far less energy than silicon to process for manufacturing, they still demand very high temperatures of over 1000 degrees Celsius (or over 1832 degrees Fahrenheit). Scaling up high-entropy materials for industrial-scale manufacturing is challenging because of this enormous energy input.

To overcome this hurdle, Yang and team then leveraged the unique qualities of a well-studied solar material that has intrigued researchers for many years: halide perovskites.

Perovskites are easily processed from solution at low temperature – from room temperature to around 300 degrees Fahrenheit. These lower processing temperatures could one day dramatically reduce energy costs for semiconductor manufacturers.

For the new study, Yang and team took advantage of this lower energy requirement to synthesize high-entropy halide perovskite single crystals from a solution under room-temperature or low-temperature (80 degrees Celsius or 176 degrees Fahrenheit) conditions.

Because of their ionic bonding nature, halide perovskite crystal structures require significantly lower energy to form as compared to other material systems, explained Yang.

Experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source confirmed that the resulting octahedral and cuboctahedral crystals are high-entropy halide perovskite single crystals: one set made of five elements (SnTeReIrPt or ZrSnTeHfPt), and another set made of six elements (SnTeReOsIrPt or ZrSnTeHfRePt). The crystals are approximately 30-100 micrometers in diameter. (A micrometer is one billionth of a meter, which is about the size of a speck of dust.)

The low-temperature/room-temperature technique produces single-crystal semiconductors within hours of mixing a solution and precipitating, far faster than conventional semiconductor fabrication techniques.

“Intuitively, making these semiconductors is like stacking octahedral-shaped molecular ‘LEGOs’ into larger octahedral single crystals,” said Yang.

“Imagining each of these individual molecular LEGOs will emit at different wavelengths, one can in principle design a semiconductor material that would emit an arbitrary color by selecting different molecular octahedral LEGOs,” he explained. The authors demonstrated this concept by printing a California Golden Bears logo.

Stability at ambient temperature has long been a problem for advancing commercial-ready halide perovskites, but in a benchtop experiment for the new study, the high-entropy “multielement ink” halide perovskite surprised the research team with an impressive ambient-air stability of at least six months.

Yang said that the multielement ink has a number of potential applications, particularly as a color-tunable LED or other solid-state lighting device, or as a thermoelectric for waste heat recovery. In addition, the material could potentially serve as a programmable component in an optical computing device that uses light to transfer or store data.

“Our new method of making semiconductors could pave the way for a more sustainable semiconductor industry.”

– Peidong Yang, faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division

“Our high-entropy halide-perovskite semiconductor crystals, with their room-temperature and low-temperature methods, can be incorporated into an electronic device without destroying the other necessary layers, thus allowing for the easier design of electronic devices and for more widespread use of high-entropy materials in electronic devices,” said co-first author Maria Folgueras, a former graduate student fellow in the Peidong Yang group at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. Folgueras is now a senior research scientist at Dow.

“One can imagine that each of these octahedral LEGOs could carry some type of ‘genetic’ information, just like DNA base pairs carry our genetic information,” Yang said. “It would be quite fascinating if one day we could code and decode these molecular LEGO semiconductors for information science applications.”

The researchers next plan to continue designing sustainable semiconductor materials for solid-state lighting and display applications.

 

The Advanced Light Source is a user facility located at Berkeley Lab.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

 

Original title: Accelerating Sustainable Semiconductors With ‘Multielement Ink’

Author: Theresa Duque, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Link: Berkeley Lab News Center

Our 2023 group poster is now available for prospective students.

Congratulations! Yu Shan has been awarded the Hearts to Humanity Research Grant and Award 2023. Hearts to Humanity Eternal (H2H8) is a nonprofit community with a collective aim to advance humanity through sciences through the ages. The community consists of university students and postdocs pursuing STEM research, members who share H2H8 core values, contribute to advance humanity through sciences, and pay back to the community.

Real-time movies show catalyst at work

March 22, 2023 – Copper is the only catalyst known to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into long-carbon-chain molecules for fuel and chemicals. However, more understanding is required to reliably produce desirable products with higher yields. Now, Yao Yang, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Peidong Yang, co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute at Berkeley, has made a key breakthrough. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Yang studied with Kavli Institute at Cornell co-director David Muller, who developed an electron microscopy technique that enables him to examine individual atoms. In a collaboration between the two Kavli Institutes, Yang invented a specialized liquid cell that enabled him to use the electron microscope to image how copper catalyzes CO₂ to form longer carbon chains. These movies show where the catalyst is most active and offer insights into ways to rationally engineer them to improve their specificity. This is of critical interest to Peidong Yang’s group in particular, where researchers are developing ways to use solar energy to drive CO₂ reactions.

 

Original title: From Movies of Catalysts to Carbon in Soil

Author: Alan S. Brown, The Kavli Foundation, Kavli Nanoscience Institute

Link: The Kavli Foundation News

Berkeley, CA, February 16, 2023 – Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.

Now, a research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has gained new insight by capturing real-time movies of copper nanoparticles (copper particles engineered at the scale of a billionth of a meter) as they convert CO₂ and water into renewable fuels and chemicals: ethylene, ethanol, and propanol, among others. The work was reported in the journal Nature last week.

“Knowing how copper is such an excellent electrocatalyst brings us steps closer to turning CO₂ into new, renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.” – Peidong Yang

“This is very exciting. After decades of work, we’re finally able to show – with undeniable proof – how copper electrocatalysts excel in CO₂ reduction,” said Peidong Yang, a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences and Chemical Sciences Divisions who led the study. Yang is also a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “Knowing how copper is such an excellent electrocatalyst brings us steps closer to turning CO₂ into new, renewable solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.”

Video of a 4D-STEM experiment: Yao Yang and team used the new electrochemical liquid cell to observe copper nanoparticles (ranging in size from 7 nanometers to 18 nanometers) evolve into active nanograins during CO2 electrolysis – a process that uses electricity to drive a reaction on the surface of an electrocatalyst. The new electrochemical liquid cell allows researchers to resolve images of objects smaller than 10 nanometers. (Credit: Yao Yang/Berkeley Lab. Courtesy of Nature.)

The work was made possible by combining a new imaging technique called operando 4D electrochemical liquid-cell STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) with a soft X-ray probe to investigate the same sample environment: copper nanoparticles in liquid. First author Yao Yang, a UC Berkeley Miller postdoctoral fellow, conceived the groundbreaking approach under the guidance of Peidong Yang while working toward his Ph.D. in chemistry at Cornell University.

Scientists who study artificial photosynthesis materials and reactions have wanted to combine the power of an electron probe with X-rays, but the two techniques typically can’t be performed by the same instrument.

Electron microscopes (such as STEM or TEM) use beams of electrons and excel at characterizing the atomic structure in parts of a material. In recent years, 4D STEM (or “2D raster of 2D diffraction patterns using scanning transmission electron microscopy”) instruments, such as those at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, have pushed the boundaries of electron microscopy even further, enabling scientists to map out atomic or molecular regions in a variety of materials, from hard metallic glass to soft, flexible films.

On the other hand, soft (or lower-energy) X-rays are useful for identifying and tracking chemical reactions in real time in an operando, or real-world, environment.

But now, scientists can have the best of both worlds. At the heart of the new technique is an electrochemical “liquid cell” sample holder with remarkable versatility. A thousand times thinner than a human hair, the device is compatible with both STEM and X-ray instruments.

The electrochemical liquid cell’s ultrathin design allows reliable imaging of delicate samples while protecting them from electron beam damage. A special electrode custom-designed by co-author Cheng Wang, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, enabled the team to conduct X-ray experiments with the electrochemical liquid cell. Combining the two allows researchers to comprehensively characterize electrochemical reactions in real time and at the nanoscale.

Getting granular

During 4D-STEM experiments, Yao Yang and team used the new electrochemical liquid cell to observe copper nanoparticles (ranging in size from 7 nanometers to 18 nanometers) evolve into active nanograins during CO₂ electrolysis – a process that uses electricity to drive a reaction on the surface of an electrocatalyst.

The experiments revealed a surprise: copper nanoparticles combined into larger metallic copper “nanograins” within seconds of the electrochemical reaction.

To learn more, the team turned to Wang, who pioneered a technique known as “resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSoXS) for soft materials,” at the Advanced Light Source more than 10 years ago.

With help from Wang, the research team used the same electrochemical liquid cell, but this time during RSoXS experiments, to determine whether copper nanograins facilitate CO₂ reduction. Soft X-rays are ideal for studying how copper electrocatalysts evolve during CO₂ reduction, Wang explained. By using RSoXS, researchers can monitor multiple reactions between thousands of nanoparticles in real time, and accurately identify chemical reactants and products.

The RSoXS experiments at the Advanced Light Source – along with additional evidence gathered at Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) – proved that metallic copper nanograins serve as active sites for CO₂ reduction. (Metallic copper, also known as copper(0), is a form of the element copper.)

During CO₂ electrolysis, the copper nanoparticles change their structure during a process called “electrochemical scrambling.” The copper nanoparticles’ surface layer of oxide degrades, creating open sites on the copper surface for CO₂ molecules to attach, explained Peidong Yang. And as CO₂ “docks” or binds to the copper nanograin surface, electrons are then transferred to CO₂, causing a reaction that simultaneously produces ethylene, ethanol, and propanol along with other multicarbon products.

“The copper nanograins essentially turn into little chemical manufacturing factories,” Yao Yang said.

Further experiments at the Molecular Foundry, the Advanced Light Source, and CHESS revealed that size matters. All of the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles participated in CO₂ reduction, whereas the larger nanoparticles did not. In addition, the team learned that only metallic copper can efficiently reduce CO₂ into multicarbon products. The findings have implications for “rationally designing efficient CO₂ electrocatalysts,” Peidong Yang said.

The new study also validated Peidong Yang’s findings from 2017: That the 7-nanometer-sized copper nanoparticles require low inputs of energy to start CO₂ reduction. As an electrocatalyst, the 7-nanometer copper nanoparticles required a record-low driving force that is about 300 millivolts less than typical bulk copper electrocatalysts. The best-performing catalysts that produce multicarbon products from CO₂ typically operate at high driving force of 1 volt.

The copper nanograins could potentially boost the energy efficiency and productivity of some catalysts designed for artificial photosynthesis, a field of research that aims to produce solar fuels from sunlight, water, and CO₂. Currently, researchers within the Department of Energy-funded Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA) plan to use the copper nanograin catalysts in the design of future solar fuel devices.

“The technique’s ability to record real-time movies of a chemical process opens up exciting opportunities to study many other electrochemical energy conversion processes. It’s a huge breakthrough, and it would not have been possible without Yao and his pioneering work,” Peidong Yang said.

Researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University contributed to the work. Other authors on the paper include co-first authors Sheena Louisa and Sunmoon Yu, former UC Berkeley Ph.D. students in Peidong Yang’s group, along with Jianbo Jin, Inwhan Roh, Chubai Chen, Maria V. Fonseca Guzman, Julian Feijóo, Peng-Cheng Chen, Hongsen Wang, Christopher Pollock, Xin Huang, Yu-Tsuan Shao, Cheng Wang, David A. Muller, and Héctor D. Abruña.

Parts of the experiments were performed by Yao Yang at Cornell under the supervision of Héctor Abruña, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, and David A. Muller, professor of engineering.

 

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The Molecular Foundry and Advanced Light Source are user facilities at Berkeley Lab.

 

Original title: How a Record-Breaking Copper Catalyst Converts CO₂ Into Liquid Fuels

Author: Theresa Duque, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Link: Berkeley Lab News Center

Congratulations! Maria C. Folgueras has been awarded the 2022-2023 Ross N. Tucker Memorial Award. The Tucker Award is given to recognize superior work and scholarship in the characterization, development and/or use of semiconductor, magnetic, optical or electronic materials by a graduate student or students pursuing such areas of inquiry.

For information of the award, please visit: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Students/Awards/19/

Congratulations! Jimin Kim has been awarded the 2022 MRS Outstanding Graduate Student Award.

Congratulations! Cheng Zhu has been awarded the 2023-2024 Kavli ENSI Philomathia Graduate Student Fellowship.

Congratulations! Stefano Cestellos-Blanco (MSE 2016, now a postdoctoral fellow in Zhenan Bao’s group) has been awarded the 2022 Kavli ENSI Thesis Prize!

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have demonstrated a new technique, modeled after a metabolic process found in some bacteria, for converting carbon dioxide (CO₂) into liquid acetate, a key ingredient in “liquid sunlight” or solar fuels produced through artificial photosynthesis.

The new approach, reported in Nature Catalysis, could help advance carbon-free alternatives to fossil fuels linked to global warming and climate change.

The work is also the first demonstration of a device that mimics how these bacteria naturally synthesize acetate from electrons and CO₂.

“What’s amazing is that we learned how to selectively convert carbon dioxide into acetate by mimicking how these little microorganisms do it naturally,” said senior author Peidong Yang, who holds titles of senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

“Everything we do in my lab to convert CO₂ into useful products is inspired by nature. In terms of mitigating CO₂ emissions and fighting climate change, this is part of the solution.” – Peidong Yang, Berkeley Lab senior faculty scientist, Materials Sciences Division

For decades, researchers have known that a metabolic pathway in some bacteria allows them to digest electrons and CO₂ to produce acetate, a reaction driven by the electrons. The pathway breaks CO₂ molecules down into two different or “asymmetric” chemical groups: a carbonyl group (CO) or a methyl group (CH₃). Enzymes in this reaction pathway enable the carbons in CO and CH₃ to bond or “couple,” which then triggers another catalytic reaction that produces acetate as the final product.

Researchers in the field of artificial photosynthesis have wanted to develop devices that mimic the pathway’s chemistry – called asymmetric carbon-carbon coupling – but finding synthetic electrocatalysts that work as efficiently as bacteria’s natural enzymatic catalysts has been challenging.

“But we thought, if these microorganisms can do it, one should be able to mimic their chemistry in the lab,” Yang said.

Advancing artificial photosynthesis with carbon-hungry copper

Copper’s talent for converting carbon into various useful products was first discovered in the 1970s. Based on those previous studies, Yang and his team reasoned that artificial photosynthesis devices equipped with a copper catalyst should be able to convert CO₂ and water into methyl and carbonyl groups, and then turn these products into acetate. So for one experiment, Yang and team designed a model device with a copper surface; then, they exposed the copper surface to liquid methyl iodide (CH₃I) and CO gas, and applied an electrical bias to the system.

The researchers hypothesized that CO would stick to the copper surface, triggering the asymmetric coupling of CO and CH₃ groups to produce acetate. Isotope-labelled CH₃I was used in the experiments in order to track the reaction pathway and final products. (An isotope is an atom with more or fewer neutrons (uncharged particles) in its nucleus than other atoms of an element.)

And they were right. Chemical analytical experiments conducted in Yang’s UC Berkeley lab revealed that copper’s pairing of carbonyl and methyl groups produced not only acetate but other valuable liquids, including ethanol and acetone. The isotopic tracking allowed the researchers to confirm that the acetate was formed through the combination of the CO and CH₃.

In another experiment, the researchers synthesized an ultrathin material from a solution of copper and silver nanoparticles, each one just 7 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter. The researchers then designed another model device, this time layered with the nanoparticle thin material.

As expected, the electrical bias triggered a reaction, driving the silver nanoparticles to convert CO₂ into a carbonyl group, while the copper nanoparticles transformed CO₂ into a methyl group. Subsequent analyses in the Yang lab revealed that another reaction (the coveted asymmetric coupling) between CO and CH₃ synthesized liquid products such as acetate.

Through electron microscopy experiments at the Molecular Foundry, the researchers learned that the copper and silver nanoparticles are in close contact with each other, forming tandem systems, and that the copper nanoparticles served as the catalytic center for the asymmetric coupling.

Yang said that these copper-silver nanoparticles could potentially be coupled with light-absorbing silicon nanowires in the future design of efficient artificial photosynthesis systems.

In 2015, Yang co-led a study that demonstrated an artificial photosynthesis system comprised of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria using the energy in sunlight to produce acetate from carbon dioxide and water. The finding had significant implications for a growing field in which researchers have spent decades looking for the best chemical reactions to produce high yields of liquid products from CO₂.

The new study advances this earlier work by demonstrating a synthetic electrocatalyst – the copper-silver nanoparticles – that “clearly mimics what bacteria do to produce liquid products from CO₂,” Yang said. “We still have a lot of work to do to improve it, but we’re excited by its potential to advance artificial photosynthesis.”

 

Researchers from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley participated in the study.

This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The Molecular Foundry is a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab.

 

Author: Theresa Duque, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Link: Berkeley Lab News Center

Congratulations! Maria C. Folgueras has won the Best Presentation Award at the Gareth Thomas Materials Symposium at UCSD.

Converting CO₂ into value-added liquid products through renewable electricity is a promising research direction that can significantly contribute to realizing a carbon-neutral society. Researchers have long discovered that copper-based catalysts can convert CO₂ into multicarbon aldehydes, alcohols, or acids through inorganic aqueous electrolysis¹. However, a lack of comprehensive understanding of the CO₂ transformation mechanisms, especially including the critical C-C coupling step, has hindered the development of more efficient catalyst design strategies.

In the pursuit of more efficient artificial photo-/electro-synthesis, our research group has pioneered the concept of inorganic/bio hybrids for “photon-in, chemical bond-out”, interfacing light-absorbing inorganic materials (such as Si nanowire arrays², CdS nanoparticles³, Au clusters⁴) with micro-organisms such as bacteria capable of digesting CO₂ to produce liquid fuels (so-called, “liquid sunlight”)^5-6. Nearly quantitative CO₂ to CH₃COOH conversion has been achieved under optimized conditions thanks to the highly efficient asymmetric CH₃-CO coupling pathway, that is, the Wood–Ljungdahl metabolic pathway of the bacteria. This is almost unimaginable in the current inorganic electrolysis.

Having been inspired by the Wood-Ljungdahl (W-L) pathway, we set out to explore whether a similar asymmetric coupling pathway is possible in inorganic CO₂ electrocatalysis. We also started to investigate if this reaction pathway could regulate the product spectrum, potentially towards multi-carbon oxygenates, just as the exquisite selectivity of the W-L pathway towards acetic acid (Fig. 1).

Although previous density functional theory (DFT) calculations provided a positive support for the C-C asymmetric coupling in Cu-catalyzed CO₂ electrolysis^7-8, there has been no direct experimental evidence regarding the electrocatalytic asymmetric C-C coupling over Cu surface. Therefore, we designed isotope labeled ¹³CH₃I and ¹²CO co-reduction experiments to directly address this decade-long question.

Here, the CH₃I was utilized as a precursor that can in situ generate *CH₃ on Cu surface under applied negative bias, representing deeply-hydrogenated *CH_X intermediates in CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR) while the externally introduced CO can adsorb on Cu surface (*CO) as the commonly acknowledged most important CO₂RR intermediate for multi-carbon formation (Fig. 2 left). ¹H NMR spectroscopy was used to analyze liquid products, distinguishing whether asymmetric coupling occurs on the surface of negatively biased Cu. If C-13 labeled multicarbon products exist as a result of the asymmetric ¹³CH₃–¹²CO coupling, a characteristic peak splitting would be easily observed.

With this approach, we found that common multi-carbon liquid products in CO₂RR, including ethanol, acetaldehyde, acetic acid, and acetone, are generated through the asymmetric C-C coupling process. This experimental result tells us that (1) W-L pathway-analogous asymmetric C-C coupling is indeed a viable reaction mechanism in inorganic CO₂ electrocatalysis, and (2) potentially it can be harnessed to control catalytic selectivity by promoting such asymmetric coupling pathway in CO₂RR.

We then further moved on to more practical CO₂ electrolysis with nanocatalysts to advance our understanding of asymmetric coupling. To this end, a Cu-Ag tandem nanoparticle (NP) assembly^9-10 was employed as a tandem approach¹¹ to utilize the asymmetric coupling by tuning the availability of intermediates species during the CO₂ electrolysis (Fig. 2 right). In this catalytic system, Ag NPs serve as a CO generator (“Western” or carbonyl branch) while Cu NPs work both as a *CH_X generator (“Eastern” or methyl branch) and the catalytic center for the asymmetric coupling. We first performed CO₂RR in a pure Cu NP system, and a significant amount of CH₄ was observed. Within this potential window, we then replaced a fraction of the Cu NPs with Ag NPs, therefore tuning the intermediate species ratio of *CO and *CH_x in the catalytic microenvironment. We found that the final generation rates of multicarbon oxygenates are strongly correlated with the co-existence of both intermediates. Furthermore, maximized oxygenate generation rate was achieved when those two intermediates were broadly aligned.

Based on our findings, we envision that future development of advanced inorganic “Western” and “Eastern” catalysts (i.e., tandem CO₂ electrolysis) will enable asymmetric C-C coupling at much lower overpotentials, leading to energy-efficient and selective multi-carbon oxygenate production, just like enzymatic biochemical reactions.

Author: Dr. Chubai Chen and Dr. Sunmoon Yu

Link: Nature Portfolio Chemistry Community

August 30, 2022 – Solar panels, also known as photovoltaics, rely on semiconductor devices, or solar cells, to convert energy from the sun into electricity.

To generate electricity, solar cells need an electric field to separate positive charges from negative charges. To get this field, manufacturers typically dope the solar cell with chemicals so that one layer of the device bears a positive charge and another layer a negative charge. This multilayered design ensures that electrons flow from the negative side of a device to the positive side – a key factor in device stability and performance. But chemical doping and layered synthesis also add extra costly steps in solar cell manufacturing.

Now, a research team led by scientists at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with UC Berkeley, has demonstrated a unique workaround  that offers a simpler approach to solar cell manufacturing: A crystalline solar material with a built-in electric field – a property enabled by what scientists call “ferroelectricity.” The material was reported earlier this year in the journal Science Advances.

The new ferroelectric material – which is grown in the lab from cesium germanium tribromide (CsGeBr₃ or CGB) – opens the door to an easier approach to making solar cell devices. Unlike conventional solar materials, CGB crystals are inherently polarized, where one side of the crystal builds up positive charges and the other side builds up negative charges, no doping required.

In addition to being ferroelectric, CGB is also a lead-free “halide perovskite,” an emerging class of solar materials that have intrigued researchers for their affordability and ease of synthesis compared to silicon. But many of the best-performing halide perovskites naturally contain the element lead. According to other researchers, lead remnants from perovskite solar material production and disposal could contaminate the environment and present public health concerns. For these reasons, researchers have sought new halide perovskite formulations that eschew lead without compromising performance.

“If you can imagine a lead-free solar material that not only harvests energy from the sun but also has the added bonus of having a naturally, spontaneously formed electric field – the possibilities across the solar energy and electronics industries are pretty exciting,” said co-senior author Peidong Yang, a leading nanomaterials expert known for his pioneering work in one-dimensional semiconducting nanowires for novel solar cell technologies and artificial photosynthesis. He is a senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

CGB could also advance a new generation of switching devices, sensors, and super-stable memory devices that respond to light, said co-senior author Ramamoorthy Ramesh, who held titles of senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley at the time of the study and is now vice president of research at Rice University.

Perovskite solar films are typically made using low-cost solution-coating methods, such as spin coating or ink jet printing. And unlike silicon, which requires a processing temperature of about 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit to manufacture into a solar device, perovskites are easily processed from solution at room temperature to around 300 degrees Fahrenheit – and for manufacturers, these lower processing temperatures would dramatically reduce energy costs.

But despite their potential boost to the solar energy sector, perovskite solar materials won’t be market-ready until researchers overcome long-standing challenges in product synthesis and stability, and material sustainability.

Pinning down the perfect ferroelectric perovskite

Perovskites crystallize from three different elements; and each perovskite crystal is delineated by the chemical formula ABX₃.

Most perovskite solar materials are not ferroelectric because their crystalline atomic structure is symmetrical, like a snowflake. In the past couple of decades, renewable energy researchers like Ramesh and Yang have been on the hunt for exotic perovskites with ferroelectric potential – specifically, asymmetrical perovskites.

A few years ago, first author Ye Zhang, who was a UC Berkeley graduate student researcher in Yang’s lab at the time, wondered how she could make a lead-free ferroelectric perovskite. She theorized that placing a germanium atom in the center of a perovskite would distort its crystallinity just enough to engender ferroelectricity. On top of that, a germanium-based perovskite would free the material of lead. (Zhang is now a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University.)

But even though Zhang had honed in on germanium, there were still uncertainties. After all, conjuring up the best lead-free, ferroelectric perovskite formula is like finding a needle in a haystack. There are thousands of possible formulations.

So Yang, Zhang, and team partnered with Sinéad Griffin, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry and Materials Sciences Division who specializes in the design of new materials for a variety of applications, including quantum computing and microelectronics.

With support from the Materials Project, Griffin used supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to perform advanced theoretical calculations based on a method known as density-functional theory.

Through these calculations, which take atomic structure and chemical species as input and can predict properties such as the electronic structure and ferroelectricity, Griffin and her team zeroed in on CGB, the only all-inorganic perovskite that checked off all the boxes on the researchers’ ferroelectric perovskite wish list: Is it asymmetrical? Yes, its atomic structure looks like a rhombohedran, rectangle’s crooked cousin. Is it really a perovskite? Yes, its chemical formula – CeGeBr₃ – matches the perovskite’s telltale structure of ABX₃.

The researchers theorized that the asymmetric placement of germanium in the center of the crystal would create a potential that, like an electric field, separates positive electrons from negative electrons to produce electricity. But were they right?

Measuring CGB’s ferroelectric potential

To find out, Zhang grew tiny nanowires (100 to 1,000 nanometers in diameter) and nanoplates (around 200 to 600 nanometers thick and 10 microns wide) of single-crystalline CGB with exceptional control and precision.

“My lab has been trying to figure out how to replace lead with less toxic materials for many years,” said Yang. “Ye developed an amazing technique to grow single-crystal germanium halide perovskites  – and it’s a beautiful platform for studying ferroelectricity.”

X-ray experiments at the Advanced Light Source revealed CGB’s asymmetrical crystalline structure, a signal of ferroelectricity. Electron microscopy experiments led by Xiaoqing Pan at UC Irvine uncovered more evidence of CGB’s ferroelectricity: a “displaced” atomic structure offset by the germanium center.

Meanwhile, electrical measurement experiments carried out in the Ramesh lab by Zhang and Eric Parsonnet, a UC Berkeley physics graduate student researcher and co-author on the study, revealed a switchable polarity in CGB, satisfying yet another requirement for ferroelectricity.

But a final experiment – photoconductivity measurements in Yang’s UC Berkeley lab – yielded a delightful result, and a surprise. The researchers found that CGB’s light absorption is tunable – spanning the spectrum of visible to ultraviolet light (1.6 to 3 electron volts), an ideal range for coaxing high energy conversion efficiencies in a solar cell, Yang said. Such tunability is rarely found in traditional ferroelectrics, he noted.

Yang says there is still more work to be done before the CGB material can make its debut in a commercial solar device, but he’s excited by their results so far. “This ferroelectric perovskite material, which is essentially a salt, is surprisingly versatile,” he said. “We look forward to testing its true potential in a real photovoltaic device.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science.

The Advanced Light Source, Molecular Foundry, and NERSC are DOE Office of Science user facilities at Berkeley Lab.

Author: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Link: Berkeley Lab News Center

August 19, 2022 – Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP), the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler, has announced a collaboration, through its innovation investment platform CCEP Ventures, with the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) to develop scalable methods of converting captured CO₂ into sugar.

CCEP Ventures’ initial investment with UCB will support the Peidong Yang Research Group on foundational research which will focus on enabling the production of sugar from CO₂ on site and at an industrial level, with expectation of future investments to drive scale – from lab to pilot phase.

This investment demonstrates the role innovation can play in CCEP’s journey to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. The development of lab scale prototypes could make the generation of essential raw and packaging materials more sustainable in the long-term. It could reduce, some of the largest CO₂ contributors in supply chains, while saving material, transportation and logistics costs.

With agricultural ingredients, including sugar, amounting to approximately a quarter of CCEP’s overall carbon footprint, this technology could not only reduce emissions associated with sugar manufacturing processes but positively contribute to optimizing land usage as less arable land becomes available due to global population growth.

In the longer-term this technology may also make the conversion of CO₂ into PET plastic more efficient by reducing the need for crude oil in the manufacturing process and significantly lowering costs.

At CCEP, we want to grow sustainably, producing beverages that people love while helping to build a better future for our business, communities and the planet. CCEP Ventures is helping us find solutions to industry challenges and provide funding to make these foundational technologies a reality. We’re excited to be involved in this project that could lead the industry in the development of transformational technology capable of converting CO₂ into more complex, usable goods. – Craig Twyford, Head of CCEP Ventures.

 

Air to sugar conversion could significantly impact our ability to preserve the natural world. This is a bold scientific vision that would bring immediate environmental benefits, fundamentally transforming the production and distribution of goods across the world. We are pleased to be working with CCEP Ventures on research that could make a significant impact on our ability to create a more sustainable future. – Prof. Peidong Yang, UC Berkeley.

The Peidong Yang Group at the University of California, Berkeley also received a prize from NASA for a viable prototype for conversion of CO₂ to sugar for potential use on long-haul space missions.

Author: Coca-Cola Europacific Partners

Link: Coca-Cola Europacific Partners – News

Our 2022 group poster is now available for prospective students.

Dr. Yao Yang’s latest paper on “Operando Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering Studies of Chemical Environment and Interparticle Dynamics of Cu Nanocatalysts for CO₂ Electroreduction” (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c03662) has been selected as an Advanced Light Source (ALS) Science Brief by a panel of ALS scientists, managers, and communicators. Congratulations!

The full article can be accessed here: https://als.lbl.gov/operando-study-of-co2-reduction-by-copper-nanoparticles/.

FLORHAM PARK, NJ, May 5, 2022 – The California Research Alliance (CARA) by BASF has led to 100 research projects between the chemical company and the more than 10 universities that are part of CARA since its establishment in 2014. The research projects in the areas of new functional materials, catalysis, chemical synthesis, engineering processes, biosciences, formulations and digitalization, have generated more than 30 patent applications and nearly 70 peer-reviewed articles. To continue this successful research approach, BASF and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) signed a five-year extension of the CARA collaboration at its Spring Review event.

“The continuation of our partnership reinforces the importance of academic collaboration to support industry innovation for BASF,” said Dr. Detlef Kratz, designated President of Group Research, BASF SE. “At BASF, tackling sustainability challenges requires innovation and collaboration with external partners. As we have seen over the last eight years, the combination of our research power with the strength of the CARA network has led to many sustainability-driven breakthroughs and we are eager to see how they evolve into commercial products in the next years.”

“The open relationship created between BASF scientists and researchers in my group at UC Berkeley, and across the entire UC system, have enabled discussions in many forms,” said Professor John Hartwig, Henry Rapoport Chair, Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley. “These discussions have led both sides to see opportunities for collaborative research on topics we never would have imagined alone and create opportunities to take academic research into new directions with an eye for practical outcomes with a positive effect on sustainability.”

Notable progress in inorganic material research to enable energy savings

CARA is a multidisciplinary research center, headed by the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. Since CARA began, BASF experts and researchers from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and several other leading universities in California have worked together on multiple research projects to test new materials, evaluate new technologies and explore new processes that will help address key sustainability challenges.

A joint team in the field of inorganic material research is developing a stable, ligand-free semiconductor ink based on lead-free halide perovskites, which can potentially be used in coatings, electronics and catalysis.

Traditional semiconductor materials are usually not readily solution-processable and result in complex and energy-intensive fabrication processes. Based on its research, the CARA team has developed a novel semiconductor ink that can be patterned onto various materials and converted back to the pure solid-phase in air.

“The unique ability to rapidly transform back and forth between an easily processable semiconductor ink and the solid-state perovskite crystalline systema potentially enables energy-efficient fabrication processes,” said Dr. Kerstin Schierle-Arndt, Vice President of Research for Inorganic Materials at BASF and Associate Director of CARA. “The deep know-how on inorganic materials and applications from the CARA team combined with the guidance provided by UC Berkeley Professor Peidong Yang is proving decisive for the development of this new material.”

Algae in focus for biobased and biodegradable polymeric materials

Professors Steve Mayfield and Mike Burkart at UC San Diego aspire to develop novel biobased and biodegradable polymeric materials. Supported by CARA, they are working to develop aliphatic isocyanates from algae biomass using phosgene-free flow chemistry and demonstrate their biodegradability. In addition, the project secured $6 million in funding from two Department of Energy grants.

Professor Burkart has demonstrated flow chemistry-based production of aliphatic heptamethylene diisocyanate from algae-sourced azelaic acid on bench scale, while Professor Mayfield is working on engineering algae to produce new precursors. BASF expertise in polyurethane formulation and polymer biodegradation has been key to this project’s continued success with the goal to identify and commercialize biobased and biodegradable materials to achieve sustainability commitments and meet customer needs.

Author: BASF Corporation

Link: BASF Corporation – News Release

Congratulations! Yao Yang has been awarded the 2022 AC/DC Rising Stars in Analytical Chemistry. Yao will be presenting his works on “Operando Methods for Interfacial Electrocatalysis” in the Analytical Chemistry Diversity Colloquium (AC/DC) seminar series on Wednesday, May 18th, from 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST.

The industry partnership team of California Research Alliance (CARA) by BASF wins the 2022 Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award (COSA) awarded by Chancellor Carol T. Christ. Lisette Garcia and Lynne Hollyer are mentioned:

“For their dedication and significant contribution to achieve the central missions of the California Research Alliance (CARA), a unique research center and partnership between academia and industry to bridge the gap between research and innovation. And for their exceptional organizational skills, as coordinating multiple agreements at any given time requires a strong attention to detail, exceptional communication with partners across different universities, while making sure colleagues experience exceptional service, therefore enhancing UC Berkeley’s reputation among the academia and industry community. CARA operated under one of a kind “Hub and Spokes” business model with Berkeley as the “hub” and other California research institutes as the “Spokes”. Lynne and Lissette have developed a protocol that can now be used as a guideline and model for future industry-university collaboration.”

Warmest congratulations!

The full list of winners can be accessed here: https://csac.berkeley.edu/2022-cosa-winners.

Congratulations! Libby Lineberry has been awarded the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship from the Department of Defense.

Congratulations! Maria C. Folgueras has been awarded the 2022-2023 Kavli ENSI Philomathia Graduate Student Fellowship.

Congratulations to the following group members for their recent research awards:

• Ye and Mengyu won the 2021 MRS Graduate Student Awards. The list of the recipients is available here.
• Stefano won the Gareth Thomas Materials Research Award. The list of the recipients is available here.

Prof. Peidong Yang has been elected a Foreign Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the story was reported by UC Berkeley College of Chemistry news!

Congratulations to our own Team SSwEET! We demonstrated abiotic CO2 to sugar conversion and were the only academic lab among industrial scale companies to be named a co-winner of this prize! You can read more in Berkeley News.

Congratulations! Andy has been selected by Chemistry department to receive the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. The list of Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award recipients is available at here.

Rachel has been awarded the 2021 Erich O. and Elly M. Saegebarth Prize in Chemistry! Congratulations!

Rachel has been selected to receive a 2021 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). The list of Fellow candidates and Honorable Mention recipients is available at here.

Our 2021 group poster and lab tour video for prospective students are shown below!

Research Poster

Lab Tour Video

More clear look at the research poster

 

Natural photosynthesis relies upon a series of light harvesting proteins that possess a series of limitations. They are optically limited to an absorption peak, capable of utilizing only a relatively narrow region of the solar spectrum, and susceptible to damage by higher energy photons. The properties of inorganic, solid-state semiconductors, which form the basis of high efficiency commercial photovoltaic cells, surpass those of their biological analogues. The inorganic materials possess an absorption band, above which all higher energy photons can be collected for chemical work. However, many of the highest performing materials are susceptible to a variety of damage and degradation pathways without the mechanisms for self-repair of their biological counterparts. One might envision a hybrid system, in which the best of both worlds are combined for the purpose of photochemical biosynthesis: the optoelectronic properties of inorganic chemical systems, with the synthetic, self-regenerative properties of biological systems. Through this symbiotic relationship, in which each half augments the capabilities of the other, it is possible to design a new type of biotic-abiotic interface that surpasses the capabilities of their individual components.

Our group has initiated a program to design and explore the fundamental biotic-abiotic interfaces of a model system, an artificial cell, for inorganic-biological artificial photosynthesis of a diversity of chemical products utilizing CO₂ as the sole carbon source. This model system has launched activities along several avenues: (1) selection of a biological component for chemical synthesis, (2) selection of an inorganic light harvester, (3) exploration of the synergistic effects of the inorganic-biological hybrid system, and (4) detailed study of the fundamental mechanisms at the newly formed biotic-abiotic interfaces. A battery of characterization techniques (including spectroscopy, microscopy, and analytical chemistry) have been applied to analyze the interface formed between microbes and materials as well as charge transfer and product formation. The data establish a general approach for making bacteria photosynthetic through inorganic light harvesters, and couples the biosynthesis and stabilization of inorganic semiconductor light harvesters by microbial self-repairing and self-regenerating pathways. Through this work, we will be able to demonstrate a versatile new hybrid system for the renewable production of a diversity of chemicals and shed light on the nature and underlying mechanisms of their symbiotic interactions. These studies will pave the way to next-generation inorganic-biological materials.

Research Milestones

• 2013 – “Bacterial Recognition of Silicon Nanowire Arrays”, H. Jeong, I. Kim, P. Karam, H. Choi, P. Yang, Nano Lett.
• 2014 – “Salt-Induced Self-Assembly of Bacteria on Nanowire Arrays”, K. K. Sakimoto, C.  Liu, J. Lim, P. Yang, Nano Lett.
• 2015 – “Nanowire-Bacteria Hybrids for Unassisted Solar Carbon Dioxide Fixation to Value-Added Chemicals”, C. Liu, J. J. Gallagher, K. K. Sakimoto, E. M. Nichols, C. J. Chang, M. C. Y. Chang, P. Yang, Nano Lett.
• 2016 – “Self-photosensitization of Nonphotosynthetic Bacteria for Solar-to-chemical Production”, K. K. Sakimoto, A. B. Wong, P. Yang, Science.
• 2016 – “Spectroscopic elucidation of energy transfer in hybrid inorganic-biological organisms for solar-to-chemical production”, Nikolay Kornienko, Kelsey K. Sakimoto, David M Herlihy, Son C Nguyen, A. Paul Alivisatos, Charles B. Harris, Adam Schwartzberg, Peidong Yang, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.
• 2017 – “Cyborgian Material Design for Solar Fuel Production: The Emerging Photosynthetic Biohybrid Systems”, Kelsey K Sakimoto, Nikolay Kornienko, Peidong Yang, Acc. Chem. Res.
• 2018 – “Semiconductor-Cell Bio-interface Roadmap: Semiconductor-Microorganism Catalytic Biohybrid Systems For Artificial Photosynthesis”, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Peidong Yang, Phys. Biol.
• 2018 – “Physical Biology of the Materials-Microorganism Interface”, Kelsey Sakimoto, Nikolay Kornienko, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Jongwoo Lim, Chong Liu, Peidong Yang, J. Am. Chem. Soc.
• 2018 – “Cytoprotective metal-organic frameworks for anaerobic bacteria”, Zhe Ji, Hao Zhang, Hao Liu, Omar M. Yaghi, Peidong Yang, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
• 2018 – “Bacteria photosensitized by intracellular gold nanoclusters for solar fuel production”, Hao Zhang, Hao Liu, Zhiquan Tian, Dylan Lu, Yi Yu, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Kelsey Sakimoto, Peidong Yang, Nature Nanotechnology.
• 2018 – “Semi-artificial photosynthesis: interfacing nature’s catalytic machinery with synthetic materials”, Nikolay Kornienko, Jenny Zhang, Kelsey Sakimoto, Peidong Yang, Erwin Reisner, Nature Nanotechnology.
• 2020 – “Photosynthetic semiconductor biohybrids for solar-driven biocatalysis”, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Hao Zhang, Ji Min Kim, Yue-xiao Shen, Peidong Yang. Nature Catalysis.
• 2020 – “Close-packed nanowire-bacteria hybrids for efficient solar-driven CO2 fixation”, Yude Su, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Ji Min Kim, Yue-xiao Shen, Qiao Kong, Dylan Lu, Chong Liu, Hao Zhang, Yuhong Cao, Peidong Yang, Joule.
• 2020 – “Microbes 2.0: Engineering Microbes with Nanomaterials”, Rong Cai, Ji Min Kim, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Jianbo Jin, Peidong Yang, AsiaChem.
• 2021 – “Liquid Sunlight: The Evolution of Photosynthetic Biohybrids”, Peidong Yang, Nano Letters.
• 2021 – “Towards a Biomanufactory on Mars”, A. Berliner et al., Front. Astron. Space Sci.
• 2021 – “Production of PHB from CO2-derived acetate with minimal processing assessed for space biomanufacturing”, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Skyler Friedline, Kyle Benjamin Sander, Anthony J Abel, Ji Min Kim, Douglas S Clark, Adam Paul Arkin, Peidong Yang. Front. Microbiol.
• 2022 – “Photosynthetic Biohybrid Co-culture for Tandem and Tunable CO₂ and N₂ Fixation”, Stefano Cestellos-Blanco, Rachel R. Chan, Yue-xiao Shen, Ji Min Kim, Tom A. Tacken, Rhesa Ledbetter, Sunmoon Yu, Lance C. Seefeldt, Peidong Yang, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

 

Explore other research projects:

• Liquid Sunlight Project

• Semiconductor Nanowire

• Electrocatalysis

• Nanowire-Cell Interface
• Nanowire Photonics
• Nanowire-based Solar Cells
• Nanowire Thermoelectrics
• Nanotube Nanofluidics
• Plasmonics

 

Dohyung and Sunmoon have contributed a blog post of their work on selective CO2 electrocatalysis to the Nature Research Chemistry Community website!

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which was founded in 1848 and is the world’s largest general scientific society, announced that 489 of its members, among them eight scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), have been named Fellows. A full introduction can be found on the Berkeley Lab News and Berkeley News!

Stefano has been selected to be one of the 25 outstanding young scientists and winner of the Green Talents Competition 2020. Congratulations! His work on artificial photosynthesis is also introduced on the Green Talents website!

Prof. Peidong Yang has been recognized as one of the three laureates of the 2020 Global Energy Prize for pioneering invention of nanoparticle based solar cell and artificial photosynthesis!

This year’s geography of applications for the Prize’s shortlist has considerably expanded – 78 scientists from 20 countries were put forward. In 2019, only 39 scholars from 12 countries took part in the Prize’s nomination cycle.

Since 2003, 42 researchers have become the Global Energy Prize laureates representing 15 countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, Ukraine, and the USA.

Yude, Stefano and Ji Min’s work on nanowire-bacteria hybrids for CO2 fixation has been reported by Berkeley News, Optics & Photonics News, Popular Mechanics and Cosmos.

This work is published online in Joule journal.

Hone, Jia and Joohoon’s work on single-crystalline perovskite blue LEDs has been highlighted by Berkeley News.

A special issue on Nanowires edited by Peidong is published in Chemical Reviews. This special issue
comprehensively summarized the progress made over the past 25 years for the nanowire research field.
Our group contributed two articles: Nanowires for Photonics; Nanowire Photoelectrochemistry.

A Review article by Mike Ross, et al, titled “Designing Materials for Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide
Recycling” is published in Nature Catalysis.

NASA awarded a total of $250,000 to five teams in the initial phase of the CO2 Conversion Challenge. Our team led by Mike, Stefano, and Yifan is one of the winers! Congratulations!

The purpose of the challenge is to convert carbon dioxide into glucose in order to eventually create sugar-based fuel, food, medicines, adhesives and other products. While sugar-based biomaterials are created on Earth by plants, this is not practical for space missions because of limited resources such as energy, water and crew time. This capability would let future Martian explorers manufacture products using carbon dioxide in the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

Yuhong’s work on delivery of macromolecules into cells has been reported by Berkeley News. This work is published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Effective January 1, 2019, our PI, Prof. Peidong Yang, assumes the role of Director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (ENSI). The Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (Kavli ENSI) at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – leaders in energy research and the measurement and manipulation of matter at the nanoscale – is dedicated to studying how nature manages energy at the nanoscale and to developing entirely new ways to capture, store, and harness energy for the world’s growing population.

Clarivate Analytics has released the report “Highly Cited Researchers 2018”. Scientists named Highly Cited Researchers are among an elite group recognized for exceptional research performance demonstrated by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science.

Among 4,058 researchers, Prof. Peidong Yang is named as Highly Cited in three fields (Chemistry, Materials Science, and Physics). Only 24, or 0.6% of Highly Cited Researchers appear in three fields. They are a group remarkable in both output and impact. The high level of performance of these two dozen warrants special recognition as citation superstars.

Hao’s work on gold cluster-bacteria photosynthetic biohybrid system has been reported by Physics World.

This work has also been reported in College of Chemistry website.

Video above: When fed gold nanoclusters, the bacterium Moorella thermoacetica is transformed into a hybrid artificial photosynthesis system that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into useful chemicals for solar fuels. 

Hao’s work on MOF protected bacteria-semiconductor hybrid has been reported in Berkeley News.

Just as spacesuits help astronauts survive in inhospitable environments, newly developed “spacesuits” for bacteria allow them to survive in environments that would otherwise kill them.

Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute Thesis Prize Selection Committee has selected Dohyung to receive the 2017-2018 Best Thesis Prize. The prize is given to the student with the outstanding thesis, publication status, strength of supporting letters and relevance of the thesis to the Kavli ENSI mission. Congratulations!

Nick Kornienko (Ph.D. 2016) will start his independent research at the University of Montreal (http://en.chimie.umontreal.ca/home/) Department of Chemistry as an Assistant Professor. Congratulations!

Chenlu and Fan won the Chinese Oversea Outstanding Graduate Student Award. Congratulations!

Dohyung won the MRS Graduate Student Award, congratulations!

“New Smart Windows Darken in the Sun—and Generate Electricity at the Same Time“, Jia’s work published in Nature Materials has been reported by Science News.

This work has also been reported in Huffington Post: “This Tech Could Turn Every Window In Your House Into A Source Of Green Electricity“;

In Berkeley News: “Chemists Create Tinted Windows that also Generate Electricity“;

And in ABC7 News: “UC Berkeley glass will one day make windows into solar panels”.

Kelsey’s work reported by Harvard Science Review.

“A New Direction towards Carbon Management“, an interview of Dohyung by Chemical Today Magazine.

Chong is named SN 10 for 2017 – ten early- and mid-career scientists who stand out to mentors and peers as people who will make a difference – presented by Science News. Congratulations!

Dohyung’s paper in PNAS is reported by LBNL News Center: “Copper Catalyst Yields High Efficiency CO2-to-Fuels Conversion — Berkeley Lab scientists discover critical role of nanoparticle transformation”.

This work has also been reported in C&EN: “Copper nanoparticles could help recycle CO2 into fuel — New catalyst converts carbon dioxide to two- and three-carbon compounds”.

Mike’s work on syngas electrosynthesis in JACS is reported by LBNL News Center: “Scientists Fine-Tune System to Create ‘Syngas’ from CO2”.

Woochul’s work on “ultralow thermal conductivity in all-inorganic halide perovskites” has been highlighted in LBNL News Center, titled “A Semiconductor That Can Beat the Heat“.

A newly discovered collective rattling effect in a type of crystalline semiconductor blocks most heat transfer while preserving high electrical conductivity – a rare pairing that scientists say could reduce heat buildup in electronic devices and turbine engines, among other possible applications.

Kelsey’s work presented at the American Chemical Society meeting in Washington has been reported by BBC News: “Cyborg bacteria deliver green fuel source from sunlight“.

This work has also been reported by Berkeley News: “Cyborg bacteria turn sunlight into useful chemicals” and also released by ACS: “Cyborg bacteria outperform plants when turning sunlight into useful compounds“.