Michigan Technological University
Department of Physics

is pleased to announce a colloquium

with

David Tománek

Carbon Nanotubes and the Nanotechnology Revolution

The continuous reduction of device sizes, which is rapidly approaching the atomic level, calls for new approaches to design and test future building blocks of Nanotechnology. Computers will become the most powerful tool to interpret what happens on the nanometer scale, where as I will illustrate, structures of carbon – such as nanotubes – may become stronger than steel, yet turn into quantum conductors or even efficient heat conductors [1].

In nanostructures that form during a hierarchical self-assembly process, even defects may play a different, often helpful role. An efficient self-healing process may convert less stable atomic assemblies into other, more perfect structures, thus answering an important concern in molecular electronics. Defects may even be used in nano-scale engineering to form complex systems such as carbon foam or nanotube peapods [2].

In this presentation, I will show how some of these challenging problems can be most efficiently addressed in simulations on recently available massively parallel supercomputers.

[1] Savas Berber, Young-Kyun Kwon and David Tománek, Unusually High Thermal Conductivity of Carbon Nanotubes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 4613 (2000).
[2] Savas Berber, Young-Kyun Kwon, and David Tománek, Microscopic Formation Mechanism of Nanotube Peapods, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 185502 (2002).

Schematic model of carbon foam	End-on encapsulation of a fullerene

Friday, October 3, 2003

2:00 p.m., Fisher 139

Refreshments will be served

MTU | Physics | Colloquium