News

Zachary Ulissi and his team developed a machine learning system to search through millions of intermetallics to discover new materials for electrocatalysis.

Typically, catalysts are discovered through trial and error coupled with chemical intuition. Now, an automatic machine-learning framework has been developed that can guide itself to fnd intermetallic surfaces with desired catalytic properties.

Through their study, published in Nature Catalysis, they have a list of materials and intermetallic combinations that experimentalists should try, both for hydrogen evolution and carbon dioxide reduction. The experiments will then determine what will make good electrocatalysts for the large scale.

Hrvoje Petek has won the 2019 Ahmed Zewail Award in Ultrafast Science and Technology of the American Chemical Society.

The award, which has been given yearly since 2005, recognizes outstanding and creative contributions to fundamental discoveries or inventions in ultrafast science  and technology in areas of physics, chemistry, biology, or related fields.

The single-shot measurements offer a unique opportunity to study fundamental properties of non-equilibrium condensation in the presence of a reservoir. David Snoke and his colleagues have recently reported an insight into spontaneous condensation by imaging long-lifetime exciton polaritons in a high-quality inorganic microcavity in a single-shot optical excitation regime, without averaging over multiple condensate realisations. The results are published in the Journal of Nature Communications. They have demonstrated that how condensation is strongly influenced by an incoherent reservoir and that the reservoir depletion, the so-called spatial hole burning, is critical for the transition to the ground state.

Giannis Mpourmpakis is part of a collaborative research team studying the corrosion behavior of glass containers often used to store nuclear waste. Its goal is to find solutions to reduce or avoid the degeneration of the containers. The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $800,000 to the project, titled “Formation of Zeolites Responsible for Waste Glass Rate Acceleration: An Experimental and Computational Study for Understanding Thermodynamic and Kinetic Processes.” 

Karl Johnson and John Keith lead a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering and Wickliffe, Ohio-based Lubrizol Corporation to unlock the secrets of Polyisobutylene (PIB)’s reaction mechanism.

PIB is a workhorse polymer that is found in a multitude of products, ranging from chewing gum, to tires, to engine oil and gasoline additives. Although commercially produced in large quantities since the 1940s, PIB chemistry was a mystery – scientists weren’t sure how the reaction mechanism that creates the polymer happens at the molecular level, which limited further potential. 

Utilizing the University’s Center for Research Computing to analyze the molecular processes, the Pitt/Lubrizol group found that the assumed reaction mechanism was not correct and that initiation of the reaction requires a “superacid” catalyst. 

The group’s findings were published this month in the journal ACS Catalysis.

David Waldeck has been selected as the winner of the Bioelectrochemistry Prize of the International Society of Electrochemistry, in recognition of his fundamental work on charge transport phenomena associated with biomolecules, electron transport through proteins and nucleic acids, and electron transfer at biomolecule/electrode interfaces. The Society will present the Bioelectrochemistry Prize publicly at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Durban, South Africa.

A low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope (LT-STM) has recently been commissioned at Carnegie Mellon University, and is available for use by external users. The instrument allows atomic-resolution studies of surface structure and spectroscopic studies of electronic states within a few eV on either side of the Fermi energy. Base temperature is 7 K, and there is a magnetic field capability of up to 2T perpendicular to the sample surface.

First results have been obtained by a team led by Randall Feenstra and Ben Hunt, working with postdoc Felix Lupke, grad student Dacen Waters, and undergrads Nicolas Iskos and Nick Speeney. They studied a two-dimensional (2D) material, Tungsten Ditelluride (WTe2), which is a topological insulator, with properties that will likely spur technological innovations such as spintronics and quantum computing.

Users interested in utilized the LT-STM should contact Prof. Feenstra (feenstra@cmu.edu).

Paul Leu is featured as one of the 22 young Pittsburgh leaders paving the way in Pittsburgh's technology field. The honorees are selected by The Incline website in the Who's Next series, which is a monthly series honoring under-40 professionals making Pittsburgh a better place. Paul Leu is awarded for his work on making solar energy economical with new materials for solar cells that are more efficient, lighter, flexible and less expensive. 
 

Mostafa Bedewy has been awarded a new research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for $330,000 as a single principal investigator (PI).  The award, titled “Functionally Graded Carbon Nanotubes by Dynamic Control of Morphology during Chemical Vapor Deposition”, will fund research in the NanoProduct Lab (Bedewy Research Group) for three years focusing on studying and controlling the catalytic activation and deactivation during the chemical synthesis of vertically aligned nanotubes.

Manufacturers use carbon nanotubes in a variety of commercial products from baseball bats and bicycle frames to aerospace structures. Attributes such as a tensile strength 20 times higher than steel and an electrical conductivity 10 times that of copper have caused the global carbon nanotube market to soar to $3.43 billion in 2016, and it is projected to double by 2022.

Bedewy will employ a combination of experimental and modeling techniques to reveal the kinetics of activation and deactivation in large populations of carbon nanotubes known as “nanotube forests.”