Pulickel Ajayan - Research

Research

Ajayan is a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology. His PhD work (1989) involved the characterization of gold nanoparticles on oxide substrates and their phase instabilities. He was involved in the early development of carbon nanotubes. From 1991 onwards, at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, he worked with Sumio Iijima and Thomas Ebbesen and published some of the early works in carbon nanotubes. During the past two decades he has published more than 350 papers on various aspects of carbon nanostructures, mostly on nanotubes and recently on graphene and other layered materials such as boron nitride. Ajayan’s research interests are broad, focusing on nanomaterials development for a variety of applications such as energy storage, composites, electronics and sensors. His publications have earned nearly 25,000 citations and a h-index of 82 until mid-2011. He has to his credit, two Guinness World Records for creating the smallest brush and the darkest material. Ajayan's team created the darkest material known to man, a carpet of carbon nanotubes, that reflects only 0.045% of the light. In August 2007, he was in the news for creating an energy storage device on a piece of paper, called the paper battery. In a brief interview with Discover Magazine, Ajayan stated he believes the paper battery will have many important future applications in industry and medicine. Most recently, the research group created materials capable of effectively removing contaminants from water by coating the sand with carbon.

Ajayan’s present research interests include nanotechnology enabled energy storage devices (battery, supercapacitor and hybrid devices), nanocomposites, layered materials, 3D nanostructured materials, and smart material systems. Apart from leading a research group (~30-35 people, including post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students, and international visiting scholars), he focuses on teaching and lecturing around the world on nanotechnology. He regularly serves on the advisory board of several materials and nanotechnology journals, nanotechnology startups and international conferences. In his role as an academic at Rice and RPI, Ajayan has been a major promoter of nanotechnology, teaching various interdisciplinary courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, emphasizing the changes occurring in the science and engineering curriculum. Constantly traveling to expand the field, Ajayan’s group has a large number of collaborators worldwide and he spends a good amount of time abroad and inside the United States. He has visiting Professor positions at various prestigious Universities around the world, such as Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and Shinshu University (Japan). He was a visiting Professor at ISIS, Strasbourg, France for several months during 2003 and a Helmoltz-Humboldt prize winner and frequent visitor at the Institute of Nanotechnology in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany during 2007-2010.