Events Calendar

Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar - - Lyman L. Handy Colloquia

Speaker: Professir Chris G. Van de Walle, Materials Department, University of California, Santa Barbara

Talk Title: Hydrogen interactions with materials: From transistors to fuel cells

Abstract: Hydrogen is almost always unintentionally present as an impurity in materials, and often significantly affects their properties: structural materials are weakened by hydrogen embrittlement, semiconductors suffer a hydrogen-induced decrease in conductivity, and battery electrodes hydrogen can degrade when exposed to hydrogen. The application of hydrogen as an energy source in fuel cells lends additional urgency to understanding hydrogen interactions with materials. State-of-the-art first-principles calculations have allowed us to elucidate the many facets of this behavior. A systematic study of hydrogen in a wide range of hosts has revealed the existence of a universal alignment for the electronic level of hydrogen in semiconductors, insulators, and even aqueous solutions. The alignment allows predicting the electrical activity of hydrogen in any host material and shows that the physics of hydrogen turns out to be unexpectedly connected to other important problems in materials physics and electrochemistry.



Biography: Chris Van de Walle is a Distinguished Professor of Materials and the inaugural recipient of the Herbert Kroemer Endowed Chair in Materials Science at the UC, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining UCSB in 2004, he was a Principal Scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1986 and was a postdoc at IBM (1986-1988) and a Senior Member of Research Staff at Philips Laboratories (1988-1991). He has published over 400 research papers, holds 24 patents and has given over 200 invited and plenary talks. Van de Walle is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the APS, AVS, AAAS, MRS, IEEE, and the recipient of a Humboldt Award for Senior US Scientist, the David Adler Award from the APS, the Medard W. Welch Award from the AVS, and the TMS John Bardeen Award.

Host: Dr. Kalia

Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 200

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family