Trends with Graphene Young Researchers (I)
Interview with Aleandro Antidormi (ICN2, Spain)
Welcome back to this issue of my Graphene newsletter. As I had already announced in previous issues, we start today a series of interviews with young researchers who have their research field around Graphene. For several years we have been organizing conferences after I left research and this has allowed me to meet many people from many countries. I met many of them when they were PhD students and now they are Doctors and many of them even have their own research group. I wanted to focus on those young researchers who recently finished their doctoral thesis and are currently doing a PostDoctoral or with a contract in a University / Research Center.
I would like to start this series of interviews with Aleandro Antidormi (Italy). I have known Aleandro for a long time and I have met him in several conferences. Thank you very much Aleandro for lending me some of your time.
1. Hello Aleandro, tell us how graphene came to your life.
Hello Jose and thanks for this nice interview. I am really pleased to tell you how my research is related to graphene and when everything started. Apart from my initial acquaintance with this material in graduate courses on Material Science and Solid State Physics, my first contact with graphene as an active researcher was in 2016, when I was 28 years old. At that time I was a Ph.D visiting student at Institut Catala de Ciencia de Materials (ICMAB-CSIC) in Barcelona and started investigating the electronic and thermal properties of graphene nanoribbons. In particular, my interest was in exploring the impact of mechanical stress onto their electrical performance. I was really excited to delve into the properties of a two-dimensional material which was so promising and still unknown! Since then, my interest for graphene and other two-dimensional materials has never stopped and covers most of my current research activity.
2. What role does graphene play in your research at the present time?
Graphene in all its modifications represents the core of my current research activity. As a post-doctoral researcher at ICN2 in the group of Theoretical and Computational Nanoscience Group under the supervision of Prof. Stephan Roche, I am involved in a series of international projects all dealing with promising applications of graphene. In particular, my research is currently devoted to the study of graphene-based devices for gas sensing applications and, from a more theoretical point of view, to the understanding of the photo-thermoelectric properties of graphene. A large part of my research is also occupied by the investigation of thermal and electronic properties of its disordered forms, i.e. reduced graphene oxides and amorphous graphene. In this respect, the latter has been attracting a lot of interest in the last few months since it has been recently fabricated by chemical vapor deposition and structurally characterized. And it seems to have some interesting applications as a coating material or in magnetic recording media.
3 Currently research groups are focusing mainly on obtaining Graphene in large quantities at low cost. Which country do you think will have more options to get it?
In the last few years, a lot of progress has been made in the process of commercialization of graphene and recent studies show that the graphene market is expected to grow in the next decade. In this growing interest in graphene (in all its different forms), China has evolved into a prominent territory in terms of production capacity of this material. Also regarding commericialization, Chinese companies are leading the competition, with graphene already used in batteries, anti-corrosion coatings and some printed heater applications. Although a lot of progress in producing and commercializing graphene is being made also in non-Asias countries, I think that China has now the largest chance to dominate the market in the next years.
4. Carbon nanotubes appeared a few years ago and it gave the impression that thanks to the properties they had, great challenges could be achieved with them. However, they went down in history as soon as graphene appeared. What future do you see for Graphene?
Graphene was synthesized for the first time some decades ago and is making its way to find its place in a variety of applications. However, the need has emerged for a clear “killer application” for graphene which could give this material the chance to excel among all other possible materials. The quest for such a kind of application has not given yet useful results; however, this has not determined a weakening of the interest and of the efforts in making graphene commercially available for other aplications. In my personal opinion, I think that the need of a killer application for graphene is still ongoing and the growth of graphene market will continue in the next years. Many more applications will appear making use of graphene-based devices and graphene-based photonics could be one of those. Optical telecommunications and the search for data transmission at growing rates represent a very promising field which could largely benefit from graphene optical and electrical features. And maybe become the killer application that many are looking for?
Fig. Atomistic Models of amorphous Graphene and Graphene Oxides
5. Throughout all these years of research we have coincided in several graphene conferences. Is there any talk that has been etched in your memory? I personally remember one, unrelated to Graphene, in 2004 from Dr Shinji Matsui University of Hyogo (Japan), who presented us the arm of a future nanorobot, fully functional made from nanotubes where the fingers opened and closed thanks to electrostatic charges.
Right, Jose: it has been a pleasure meeting in many (physical and online) conferences. Among all the talks I have attended I do remember the one given by Prof. Barbaros Oezyilmaz, from National University of Singapore at the Graphene Industrial Forum 2020. He presented his latest results on the laser-assisted CVD synthesis and characterization of amorphous carbon monolayers published in [1]. In particular, he showed how their measurements were able to clearly unveil the disordered character of the carbon plane via Raman and X-ray spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. These techniques helped assessing the crystallite nature of the material: this means that amorphous graphene is ultimately made by crystalline domains of hexagonal rings surrounded by totally amorphous regions. I have been really captured by this talk since the presented talk has a direct connection with my own work and with my general interest for disordered materials, I.e. lacking both short- and long- range atomic orders.
[1] Synthesis and properties of free-standing monolayer amorphous carbon; Toh et al., Nature (Jan 2020)
6. How has the COVID19 pandemic affected the day-to-day running of your research?
Soon after the pandemic started, going physically to work was strongly discouraged and smartworking was put in place for all the members of my institution who could still perform remotely their activity. This means that I started working from home and my daily routine has slightly changed: I installed my office at home and gave up taking a train to go to work. My research activity mostly requires coding and making calculations on a computing machine and this has luckily not been affected by the pandemic outbreak. A major change has, however, affected, both the interaction with my colleagues and collaborators and the possibility to share ideas and results with the rest of the scientific community. All the meetings have gone online whereas many conferences have been momentarily postponed. This has partially jeopardized the sociality of my working life, which was made of funny but stimulating discussions with other researchers.
Hopefully, my institution has created a powerful infrastructure to offer services online and many agencies have organized online conferences. This has helped me keeping in contact with my collaborators and the rest of the world still remaining at home.
7. I seem to remember that you have done research in Italy and Spain, is it correct? Can you tell us what the differences are between the two countries in the area of research?
Yes, right. Before joining ICN2 in Barcelona, I did my first post-doctoral experience at the Physics Department of the University of Cagliari, in Italy. In my personal experience, Spain and Italy have very similar approaches towards research, with academic and research institutions similarly involved in recruiting young researchers to work in the framework of international collaborations and projects. In my ongoing projects I am indeed collaborating with many other scientists from European countries and there are no substantial differences in this respect. This is certainly a consequence of the increased networking which has become a key ingredient of contemporary scientific research fostering advancements and knowledge development.
Acknowledgements: Thank you very much Aleandro for giving me the opportunity to interview you. I hope this interview will be to the liking of my readers. Take care.
Biography:
Aleandro Antidormi
Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), Barcelona, Spain
Post-Doctoral Researcher
Aleandro Antidormi obtained his Ph.D. in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy in 2016. He has been working as Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Physics Department of University of Cagliari, Italy from 2016 to 2018. He joined the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) in Barcelona in 2018 and he is now a post-doctoral researcher within the Theoretical and Computational Nanoscience Group led by Prof. Stephan Roche. He is currently involved in several international projects on graphene-based devices and novel disordered materials. His interest is in computational methods for the calculation of thermal and electronic properties of novel materials.
The nanometer – 10 to the -9th meter- is a miniscule unit representing the world of nanoscience and nanotechnology, a field which is sometimes unknown but which has visible effects. With the aim of discovering what happens in the nanoworld and see what is being done in the fields of research and technology at a small scale, from April , the sixth edition of the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Fest ival 10alamenos9 (www.10alamenos9.es) will take place.
The new edition of the festival, coordinated by the University of Barcelona, has more than a hundred activities, doubling the number of activities from last year’s edition. Fifty entities are taking part in the organization –universities and research institutes-, lots of them being reference entities in Iberoamerica in the field of nanotechnology.
The event is sponsored by BASF. Every year many (8) Iberoamerican countries organizes an outreach Festival with many activities, for example, this contest (https://icmab.es/concurs-de-nanorelats-organized-within-the-10alamenos9-festival). This event will take place in nine cities in Spain and other countries from April to May with activities aimed at the general public and schools, and it will have more than 5,000 participants.
The aim is to bring nanoscience and nanotechnology closer to people in a dynamic, fun and rigorous way and show people that nanotechnology is a reality, which is not seen but it is all over.
In Barcelona, there will be activities aimed at primary and secondary education schools –through the Nanoinventum/NAnoEduca project- apart from exhibitions, some with nanotechnology products and augmented reality, and seminars carried out by distinguished researchers, as well as workshops that are related to the several fields of nanoscience.
The Festival reaches its sixth edition from 2015. We made also some online activities possible such as the "Vermut de nanociència" with the main objective of bringing nanotechnologies to everybody in an understanding way and broadcasting it in streaming to make easier the participation and the debate. The talks started on April and ended on May. Last year we made 33 videos.
We are in touch
https://icn2.cat/en/outreach/education-program/10alamenos9
https://icmab.es/more-than-200-students-at-the-10alamenos9-nanoscience-and-nanotechnology-festival-at-uab-campus