Suneel Kumar Kodambaka
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Materials Science
Thin coatings, less than a micrometer thick, are used in cars, medical devices, catalysts, electronics and energy technologies. How well they perform and how long they last often depends on their crystallinity, meaning how orderly their atoms are arranged.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
Physics
- Topics
thin films
thin film growth
van der Waals materials
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test whether atoms landing on van der Waals surfaces such as hexagonal boron nitride move faster than on conventional 3D solids, using in situ variable-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy during film growth.
- Determine whether well-defined crystal orientation relationships exist between the substrate, the vdW layer and the deposited film, explaining why sputter-deposited films on hBN are more crystalline.
- Quantify how vdW layers change surface diffusion and the evolution of film shape over time, using time-resolved, atomic-scale measurements of thin film growth, and test how general the effect is.
More about the research
Improving crystallinity usually requires high temperatures, energetic beams or long heat treatments. These methods fail for very heat-resistant compounds and can damage materials that break down when heated. Atomically thin sheets such as graphite and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN, also called white graphite) offer another route. These sheets are called van der Waals (vdW) layers because they are held together by weak forces.
Why it matters
Many coating materials cannot be made more crystalline by heating, either because they resist heat or because heat damages them. Understanding how atomically thin layers such as hBN promote orderly growth could offer a gentler way to make high-quality crystalline films. This could benefit coatings for electronics, optoelectronics, catalysis, energy and biomedical devices.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nan Jiang
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Chemistry·Early-career
Image vibrational modes and electron-phonon coupling in borophene, a one-atom-thick boron sheet, with STM-TERS at about 5-ångström resolution to map strain, defects and doping.
Jedediah Pixley
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Physics
Determine how twist-angle disorder, the place-to-place variation in twist, alters electronic response in twisted bilayer graphene and twisted transition-metal dichalcogenide bilayers, using kernel polynomial calculations on large disordered models.
Sanjay Behura
San Diego State University, CA·Materials Science
Assess the translation potential of a room-temperature quantum sensor based on optically addressable spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride, light-readable flaws in an atomically thin material, through I-Corps customer discovery.
The school
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 496 research doctorates a year.
More about Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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