Seminar: Blending ‘Interesting’ vs ‘important’

Our Centre invites you to attend Professor Boris Yakobson’s seminar “Blending ‘Interesting’ vs ‘important’: Theory insights on carbon, borophene, and… ceramics” at 10:30am on Tuesday 16 December 2025. The seminar will be held at UNSW Sydney, and online via Teams for those joining us from interstate.

Join us for this free event – everyone is welcome!

Abstract:

An interesting intellectually compelling problem or even its elegant solution does not always lead to practical impact. In reversal, challenging practical problems are rarely easily articulated as scientific questions, before good answers can be even contemplated. Our examples involve carbon, boron, and ceramics materials. Nanotubes’ band gap depends on helicity, while syntheses produce mixtures. Making one type by choice is of great practical importance but an insurmountable challenge. We will sketch one approach relying on kinetic differentiation in “evolutionary selection”. || Borophene, has sprung to the research arena following prediction of the boron fullerene B80. Recent studies show hard bilayers with promising superconductivity (predicted Tc = 25-45 K), and low work function. Will this fascinating material, already synthesized, remain in the realm of scientific quest, rewarding yet ultimately academic, or it may eventually impact our daily life—on this question the jury is still out. || On the other side of “important” are ceramics, born in the heat of kilns, not academic debates, offering a challenge to unravel molecular mechanisms of synthesis and sintering. It came to the fore with demand for UHTC, for aerospace and supersonics. I will share developing theory of so-called flash synthesis, accelerated by a Joule-heat spike, which started at Rice from graphene. Focusing instead on an ‘important’ YSZ, yttria-stabilized zirconia, we argue there is a feedback-loop of O sublimation, lifting the Fermi level mobilizing Zr — key to sintering rate.

Biography:

Professor Boris Yakobson is the Karl F. Hasselmann Chair in Engineering. He holds a joint appointment between the Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering and the Department of Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA. In 2008, Yakobson received a Nano 50 Award from the science magazine, Nanotech Briefs, for his innovation in nanotechnology, and in 2009, the Department of Energy R&D Award. He received his PhD in 1982 from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr Yakobson is an editorial board member of the Journal of Nanoparticle Research and a member of the American Physical Society and the Electrochemical Society.

Prof Yakobson’s research interests are in theory and modeling of structure, kinetics, and properties of materials derived from macroscopic and fundamental molecular interactions. He has done ground-breaking work on the physical properties of nanotubes, in particular their electro-mechanics, and recently with graphene and graphene.