 Hello everyone, I'm Saqiz Aitinyan, the Program Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Systems Management Program. And on behalf of the VALENACAN and other MENSONAL accounts for the College of Science and Engineering, let me with great pleasure introduce Amalaya Postanyan, who is a doctorate candidate, specializing in Non-Engineering at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She is a scholar of the Louis Foundation and award winner of many international competitions and an influential speaker promoting educational excellence and leadership among young Armenians. She is a passionate scientist working on development of next generation flexible and transparent wearable devices using recent advances in nanotechnology. And I think this is the second public event that Amalaya take part. The first one was in February 2017 where she was a speaker, one of the speakers in open discussion universities and enterprise culture challenges and opportunities. And we hope that our ties, the ties between Amalaya and College of Science and Engineering will be given closer in the near future. Thank you very much. To start with, it's a great honor to have a public talk at AOA because during the year I've been following all the events happening here and I'm very happy that we recently have these bachelor programs that we have young generation of Armenians starting excellent program in Armenia. But before actually going into nanotechnology, I would like to briefly tell about my story because recently I have been a lot of interest towards how I reached where I reached. So I want to tell you briefly, it was around five years ago that I was exploring all the possibilities of finding myself and finding actually the subject that will influence me, the subject which kind of motivates me every day to wake up and really do my best. And I had a period of reading every subject starting from financial mathematics to quantum mechanics, chemistry and I was constantly looking for ways of exploring my potential, my talent. And actually I was lucky during that period that I was reading the book of Stephen Hawking, Brief History of Time. And it's an amazing book and I would recommend everyone to read because it's not only presenting science in a very adaptable way, telling a lot of different concepts but also presenting how you approach science, how you can actually discipline yourself to go into something very complicated in a more creative way. And during that period I was reading another book about how you can actually engineer materials from scratch by using the properties that you want and by actually kind of filling yourself as an architect and designing new generation electronics, designing new generation materials. And that for me was very powerful and very encouraging so that I kind of started looking for the best programs all around the globe. I was looking for the program from Singapore, from MIT, from Caltech and I kind of decided to go towards the program offering from Cambridge University and the rest of the thing is just the history. So that's how I started going into nanotechnology world and so far after five years I can say that this is a subject that kind of encouraging me and by small little successes, by looking for every scientist all around the world working in this multidisciplinary area is very motivating and very encouraging. So today I will be talking about three different sub-topics. First we will be talking about what nanotechnology is and what is actually, why it is so interesting for me and the rest of the people who are currently working in this area. Then I will talk a little bit about nanotechnology all around us, in nature, in humans and then the remaining part I will present a little bit about my research but only a little bit because this endless topic I can just talk the whole evening about that. So let's start. So what nanotechnology is? So imagine yourself as a person who can engineer pretty much everything. So the first, what we need to do, we need to understand how atoms are working, all the chemical and physical properties, all these defining characteristics which are keeping these electrons and neutrons, protons together and by understanding these we can actually engineer new types of molecules and by engineering new types of molecules we actually can create new types of matter which can be 2D, 0D, 1D and 2D materials and those are materials which have completely different electronic properties by changing just slightly, changing the properties of the matter you can create different properties of physics and create completely different generation of electronics and based on this you can actually prepare new types of materials and based on these materials you can create new generation of electronics so these electronics can get pretty much any discipline it can go to pharmaceutical, it can go to medical drug delivery it can go to new generation sensors, solar energy it can do pretty much any discipline you can think of basically every time I'm giving the topic in nanotechnology the first thing I am saying is just like your only limitation is your imagination basically you can create pretty much anything based on all these new properties of the material that you are getting so not going toward physics and chemistry I want to just briefly tell about why it is so enthusiastic and why it is so interesting technologically right now we are in the break of science that in terms of semiconductor industry in terms of the whole industry which is developing electronics we are in the age that we can't actually decrease the sizes of the resistor gate and because of that we can't further go in terms of changing properties making it more powerful, making it using less energy consumption because of this we are in the limitation of producing new generation of electronics based on silicon industry and the silicon industry is the main industry that has been developed during last 50 years so we have a lot of expertise producing this kind of amazing piece of electronics and right now we are in the break of limitations so why it is important to understand the advances in nanotechnology because in one way it can give us new horizon of producing and engineering new type of electronics by using all the expertise that we understood during the last 50 years on the other hand we can use new technology and new properties coming from the materials that we are engineering so why it is important scientifically right? as we are already presented by actually creating these 2D materials we are actually creating magnetic materials and we are creating 2D materials and quantum dots pretty much anything that you can think of just by thinking of what kind of materials do you want to get what properties do you want and what type of an industry it can come up to so this is another important technique that scientifically is so important and another part is actually understanding fundamentally how the measure is working because in one of the books Stephen Hawking also mentioned that right now we are in the break of understanding all theoretical and observational part of physics and create the unified theory of physics and in order to create this unified theory of physics it is important to understand how material is working it is at atomic level and how we can actually understand all the levels up until galaxies so this is like one of the aspect that it is important in order if we want to at some point understand how the universe is working all the energies and a lot of things that we are right now uncertain this is like one of the way of understanding because everything all around us all the human organism everything is based on nanotechnology and by testing all chemistry and physics all around the nanotechnology we can pretty much understand everything in terms of atomic level obviously so ok I think I almost covered this by understanding all these physical chemical properties we can engineer new type of materials and this is what this light will be so by this very nice flowery image artificially created by one of our engineers is completely artificially created but this is very beautiful this is just the demonstrational thing it's not really for something useful in terms of properties so I want to talk a little bit about right now nature and nanotechnology but do you have questions before that? ok you don't have questions ok so one of the like obvious examples I want to think about is just butterflies right so we have butterflies all around us and we know that they have these amazing vivid colors and even after butterfly dies the colors take for like 100 years so like this is another phenomenon that the scientists were thinking about like how you can actually have this kind of phenomenon by having an animal which died you can still have these vivid images so it appears that especially this morpho butterfly has this kind of artificially created structures these structures are somehow light filters what light filter is like when light enters toward these structures it transmits only the wavelength of light specifically designed for this butterfly for these butterflies it's blue for other butterflies depending it can be different so basically it's very interesting and by having this vivid picture and by this vivid color this butterfly helps to kind of get protection because it's vivid it kind of gives the security and by actually by understanding how these structures work we can actually engineer and mimic the nature and I think one of the groups in I think it was around 2007 in Cambridge they mimic the structure of the butterfly and what they did they created these sensors these kind of interesting structures they can like stay for centuries like so far you know that all the material all around us excuse me sorry so all the materials around us they have some sort of ink like mixed with the material and that kind of gives the color in this sort of property it will never lose the intensity of the color it will never lose the structural properties so it will stay for a long long time and another interesting property is that which has been developed by only changing the mechanical property of the material you can actually get different colors and this is very interesting piece of research which can be used in different disciplines and this is again I think 2011 the research group in Cambridge has developed and right now is actually used in a fashion industry which is very interesting application for such interesting phenomena so the second one that I want to talk about is lotus and everyone is familiar about this interesting hydrophobic material so I want to talk about what is hydrophobic hydrophilic so hydrophobic material is that it doesn't actually like when the molecules of water penetrate through the material and by using this hydrophobic property you can create a fabric and the clothes of like piece of clothes which doesn't actually never get wet and you can actually based on these properties you can create the whole industry of the material which can never become dry because you can actually create yeah so you can create the network of tiny fibers tiny nano fibers and you can actually design in a way that for example oxygen particles can go penetrate so it can actually breathe but the molecule of the droplets of the of water will never go inside in a size where you can design that the droplets of dirt will never go inside so your clothes will never get dirty so you can actually play with the structure of this network and create pretty much the properties that you want to create and this piece of like piece again I think it's almost going towards the industry again the fashion industry and particularly in clothes and the third one I want to talk about is gecko so gecko has very interesting property I will go inside to scanning a lecture microscope image to show actually so basically we are taking the piece of the gecko leg and by putting under the microscope and by characterizing we can see that it has very tiny tiny fibers connected with each other and because of these tiny fibers it's kind of when it touches any type of material it has so many points of connection it kind of creates some sort of adhesion properties and because of that gecko can actually go in any type of material it can go towards the sand, towards the glass any type of material and by mimicking these properties the scientists at MIT created structure by a photolithographic properties they created something similar here and what they did right now these sorts of properties are emerged to the technology of the robot which will soon go to Mars and by using this technology you can have this robot which can actually go to any type of material be it sand, be it water, anything and the last thing I want to talk is about sensors we obviously know that human eye is not the perfect optical element but we also know that it's a very interesting example of an optical element so by using the nanostructures in optical eye and by understanding how we can alter it we can create not the junky kind of structure material but we can create new generation lasers and new generation sensors completely based on nanostructures which can improve the human eye which can bring new horizons not only for vision but also sensing and all this technology again are coming from understanding how the nature is working and by mimicking the properties of the nature and by alteration we can actually create a very interesting piece of technology and this is the end of the nature part so this is the part that I will be presenting my dissertation if you don't I think you don't have any questions so this part might be slightly complicated but I will be happy to answer any questions if you have afterwards so what I did during my dissertation in Cambridge University I was growing different type of nanomaterials I started with quantum dots and then I went to carbon based materials excuse me yes excuse me so I started growing graphene carbon nanotubes, diamond like carbon, diamond and by slightly changing the atomic structure of the material you can completely change the properties and the industry it might go so my actually my love was towards graphene because right now it's still considered to be the strongest material ever found it has amazing optical and electronic properties and by understanding how we can use it in a commercial scale we can actually design lots of devices which can go in different disciplines again starting from sensors from next generation electronics going to displays which will be later discussed so my interest was towards understanding the properties of graphene and fundamental physics and then applications and then how it can be used towards any particular discipline so I actually took an example of how actually graphene can work with currently used industrially used liquid crystal materials all chemical and physical properties with these materials and how we can use and utilize these materials and alter and enhance some sort of properties to produce new generation electronics so what we did we created we created like tiny pixel which is this this image in the right so it's completely carbon-based material carbon-based to this structure based on graphene polymers and we used here also thank you we used a quantum dot that also for touch screen part which will be again later discussed so the whole ideology was to design a piece of technology which is completely organic carbon-based low power consumption and biocompatible which can be used as a device which can be worn during the day and the device which can be used in a large scale like for example a large piece of electronics large piece of display so that was the whole ideology behind my research so the first part that what we did was actually understanding the methodology of growing these nanostructures so the technology that we developed is chemical vapor deposition process during which carbon decomposes and nucleates and it creates the predominantly monolayer structure of graphene and then this graphene is later transferred to any arbitrary substrate base material again depending what type of material do you want to get what type of property it can be transferred into polymer into quartz glass into any shape depending on the industry I will be happy to talk about this if someone is interested on learning more about the graphene growth the second part as I already mentioned is wet etching transfer process again we used many different transfer methods and this was one that we found was the most suitable towards display technology electronics and this is what we get so from the beginning we were discussing the interaction of this liquid crystal material and graphene so one of the interesting property that we discovered during my period at Cambridge that the graphene having hexagonal structure somehow aligns this material and by enhancing this alignment material we have another opportunity of completely fundamentally changing the structure of the LCD so that was the one part of the research that we worked over the year in order to understanding how we can improve these properties and the second part is obviously building the device out of it by using the commercially available indium tin oxide alloy material and graphene from the other side guys please take a seat yes so so in this slide we are characterizing how the graphene aligns liquid crystal how we can enhance and by using different mixtures of liquid crystal and different structure of the graphene mixed with the polymer we can enhance this alignment properties hence having better performance from the devices and then in this slide what I'm trying to do is basically switch the pixel on and off again because we are in an early stage it's not white and black it's blue and black but again by optimization and by understanding how we can play with the material and how we can create better structures we can have whites to black but this is very promising result at this stage considering that it's only around three years of research yes so and here is just another example so this is just a micro-micrograph switching on and off on and off and this is just a log of a university here is slightly blurry here is quite completely clear which we are doing like completely trying to switch the pixel on and off and here we have the image under the polarizing optical microscope cross polarizers means is like you have only light penetrating the material which is only linearly polarized, linearly polarized means this only has one direction and by having linearly polarized light it helps us understanding the property of the material better rather than randomly polarized light which is coming from every source of light so this is the possibilities of this industry one is obviously flexible displays and everything which needs representation of data which can be presented in flexible material it can be to solar energy hybrid next generation nanostructured based solar panels and the third is obviously flexible electronics another very big topic and the beauty of this kind of technology is that you can actually print it pretty much in any material having the property of the material that you want you can print it and create it in a room temperature again in this stage we have a lot of work to do but so far it's very promising in terms of the result that we got and in terms of the discipline plus in terms of the industrial support helping these technologies to grow I think we are in a better place to pushing us toward developing this technology and I and this is everything I prepared today thank you very much and I will take any question if you have one yes please there are these new concepts of string theory I wonder if they have some applications in nanotechnologies or not so string theory is actually yes it has some sort of obviously by understanding string theory we can understand when an electron is confined in a potential when we can understand the properties better but in the stage of developing technology imagine you are working in a couple of levels above rather than actually understanding subatomic particles but obviously it has some sort of interaction because it is part of understanding fundamental quantum mechanics you had questions did I hear you correctly at the end you said you could print it with any material you mean the substrate no any type so right now around I think six months ago there have been couple of nature publications telling about the possibility of printing electronics on fabric any type of piece of cloth and this is another tendency that electronics is going towards which is actually very interesting but your material would be printed on yes so the base material is anything you want anything you want as long as it is dielectric yes so you can right now but obviously by printing I mean to prepare a mixture of adhesive materials graphene ink and by using specific methodology of printing but in theory right now we can do that even in Armenia any other questions yes please first one is verification I am going to work you are working if I understand correctly on issues related to the production of graphene layers if that is true then the second question what is the current status what is the advancement right now and the related cost of the graphene let's say I don't know one gram or one square centimeter or one square meter whatever it is what is the content of your working relation sure okay so to start with the first question so far I have been more focused towards growing the best possible graphene with the properties having predominantly monolayer biochemical vapor deposition process which is obviously not scalable in a commercial scale it's quite expensive in terms of technology rather than in terms of material itself but right now I am starting with your second question around two years there have been a couple of commercial companies offering graphene which is not as good as the material that I was growing but it can be used in a commercial scale and they are I think they started from selling around a 1000 a tiny bottle and right now they are growing because what they are doing they are using graphene ink 60-70% conductive compared with 97% conductivity that we are getting from this material so it is available commercially but we are not right now interested on commercializing graphene we want to understand more towards how we can build the piece of technology using the graphene that we are growing in our lab yes, electronics not necessarily LCDs but flexible transparent electronics and towards any representation of visual data it can be big area electronics it can be display it can be solar cells again hybrid solar cells based on quantum dots and graphene as a conductive material so those are the areas that we are currently working on what is the duration of quantum dots graphene and solar cells so that is another topic that one of my colleagues is currently working on if you want I can recommend couple of papers so he is actively publishing yes of course, sure any other questions yes what do we need to have a little that is pretty much research what do we need I think one of the first thing is understanding what do we want from the lab to have because the way I understand it should be self-sustainable lab the lab that can create has manufacturing area but also has an academic unit so what do we need I think we need a very very good team of scientists and we need a place and we need to work hard that is all that we need that is a very good question is the equipment very expensive indeed very expensive yes, very expensive equipment setting up a lab like the one that you are working on what would be the roughly roughly cost millions I would say yes is there any images when proper research might become after researching what we can have is there a chance it would be cheaper obviously like a lot of research groups are working towards making it cheaper and scalable because it does not make sense of working something which can become big and then not going towards understanding how we can make it in a larger scale so obviously printable electronics is one good example of actually going from this the whole industry of producing all the chips which are very expensive again big big manufacturing going towards actually doing in a room temperature having pretty much the same sort of transistor based devices so that is a very good example of how we can do that but I think we need to right now do more research in understanding and plus with the technology based on graphene we can say the material is pretty much available anywhere so we just need to understand and optimize the processing to make it cheaper and scalable any other question please yes so you manufacture your own graphene from your experimentation so what is the largest size that you see the process and what is the largest size so the largest can I get here now so the largest I got was something like this but given like I was 100% sure it's ideal we can do it like three times bigger than this again given the dimensions of your quartz and the process because it's growing a quartz tube so our quartz tube that we developed was not big enough to grow like very large pieces but in my case this was the size and I was actually making tiny pixels like one centimeter by one centimeter and this sort of graphene would last me like three months so it was like in like prototyping level it was but in terms of large scale I think three years ago Samsung got one meter by one meter with slightly less disadvantage properties but again good enough to go towards the display industry so it's really depending on your lab I would say what equipment do you have a lot of properties first the morphology of the foil itself that you are growing in my case I was growing in a copper iron cobalt depending on the morphology depending on the crystallography of the material the graphene which has been grown on the top can be completely different so you have to have substrate to grow of course you cannot have a layer no it's one thick material it's like almost it's very even difficult to differentiate with the naked eye because it's almost transparent it has three percent absorption so you have to grow on some sort of dielectric or if it is not dielectric it should be removed so in my case it was depending again on the properties of the material that you are growing cobalt iron in one case in nickel for example it is precipitation process in the other material it can be catalytic process and again depending on the how you know the ability of carbon of the material itself the graphene is grown completely differently so the first another important aspect to understand actually the properties of the substrate material itself and again the second part was the transfer process during which you can easily damage the graphene you can actually introduce dust particles introduce ions coming because it's growing on a material metal metal on air it can be oxidized especially during the reaction process that you are doing the chemical white processing so there are a lot of things that we have considered while developing the technology here and again I think we have a lot of things to optimize it's a very good question so right now graphene is used in different ways so one way it can be graphene flakes like big flakes not tiny flakes can be mixed with solution like toluene just flakes mixed with a toluene or any other material and you can basically depositing in any other because it's toluene it can be evaporated easily and by the end you can have this film of graphene but again you are sacrificing on optical properties because they are like depending what what processing are you making the largest can be micrometers around 300 400 micrometers completely depending on your processing conditions almost a millimeter yeah it can be almost a millimeter if it is that big and if you be full enough you can have material with good optical properties good enough like indium tin oxide currently available material for display around 70-80 percent transparency which is good enough to go again depending what do you want to reach but right now it's possible with flakes in other aspect if you want just a conductive material you can mix like random flakes with another solution but basically just simply printed by 3D printer for example what has been the best use of graphene so far in a device for some kind of application that is kind of changing something so right now the my favorite which is currently right now on market is virgin Atlantic will be using graphene as a protective layer on their airbus so that's like right now has been done and this is like something I'm really passionate about cause like you don't really need to have a very heavy aircraft you can just like have this tiny layer of graphene covered on the top of your metal yeah and make it thinner and lighter and more protected I'm not sure cause they just recently told that they gonna do that the information is not public but I really want to know how they gonna do that but right now it's my favorite so they are going towards sports industry so the making the rockets for tennis players they are going towards shoes I think around 5 years it has been in commercial use but not necessarily in electronics so it hasn't been used in a full scale of its properties yet I think you had a question you were talking about improvements of vision is it possible to make the side of electromagnetic waves outside of this visible to create an artificial eye with larger range of I am not entirely sure cause we haven't had we haven't thought about that so far maybe it's possible but I'm not sure I'm not sure sorry yes in ideal case yes yes very good question I will show you how we do that if we go to the transfer process yeah with raw material it's on the top of copper and graphene on top the first thing what we do we deposit polymer on top to make sure our graphene is completely secured the next stage what we do we edge the conductive material off with the ferrum chloride etching solution and obviously we choose exactly chemicals the way so it doesn't actually affect the polymer and graphene and what we do the rest of the process we have these all the diluting process we wash the graphene remove all the ions left all this oxide metal oxide left and after couple of washing process we are ending up having the material which is this very just like optical glass and then graphene and the polymer on top and what we do after this we basically remove the top polymer and what we are ending up is just having this base material which completely dielectric and the graphene on top and this is the kind of substrate that we go start like developing our substrate and it has to be open because we want the graphene to interact with liquid crystal no with this kind of method it's not vulnerable in terms of the processing but obviously if you scratch it and you touch it and that's part because everything will affect so everything is done in the clean rooms it encapsulated so graphene doesn't actually interact with air yes please you mentioned about the optical properties of graphene which outstanding properties are really interesting so the first one because it's one atomic layer it has only 3% absorption by adding up layers you are ending up and when it is actually one atomic layer the band structure is that it has points of like the violence band and conduction band are almost overlapping so it's kind of semi-metal so in one side it's kind of semi-metal because it has two types of carriers the conductivity is very high so in one side we have this very nice optical properties 3% absorption and on the other hand we have this interesting band structure and because of this band structure it's just conductive kind of metal material again by adding layers material becomes semi-conductor because the band structure is changing and optical properties is changing because every new layer adds up 3% of absorption yeah but even in 7 to 10 it's again the perfect material for electronics because 7 to 10 layers from 7 to 10 it's semi-conductor but again very good properties around like 90% absorption and with properties with conductivity it's still much better than any other currently available material it kind of behaves like semi-conductor but it's much better than silicon and the sodium tin oxide and what is the band gap? the band gap again it kind of becomes indirect band gap it kind of the structure becomes similar to indirect band gap kind of yes but it's much better than silicon it's near to gallium arsenide you are for a while in Armenia do you see the possibility for collaboration between centers that exist here that are very good question so I think around 2 years I've been collaborating with the nano-science center at Yerevan State University so obviously I brought graphene for them and we learned together how to transfer and based on them they made devices ahead of very good results so they have couple of publications based on the structure that we initially developed in Cambridge and then they kind of optimize it according to the properties because they are going towards optical devices rather than electronics that we are interested so they optimize the structure but yeah we have been collaborating with them and that's the only center so far that I have been working with yeah any other questions yes please so right now the hybrid solar cells they use so many different technologies so they use different mixtures of polymers they use different quantum dots they use graphene as a conductive layer they use again flexible polymer conductive polymers so depending what they want to reach and obviously every new research group is proposing something slightly different so in my research group we did we did made graphene based solar panels but again my colleague was developing so I can only answer questions related with the electronics rather than the quantum dots and the solar solar and solar cells tiny hybrid solar cells because commercially no the highest we got was 80% 8% which is like very very bad result for the materials so but we just started so by saying just like three years of research so it's a lot of room to grow yes please so how big of an because as a materials engineer myself how big of an input does industry have in pushing research within this field do you think similar inputs could be had in Armenia where industry could push materials engineering and science in Armenia something similar that happens in Europe very good question so in terms of graphene right now industry is very very impatient pushing scientists to go to in a commercial scale to producing something like or big organization like Samsung LG and even Apple they are pushing to commercialization of this kind of technology but right now I would say that we still have a lot of things to even if we kind of we prove the concept and it's possible to go towards the next stage of implementation we need to see how it can be it can be functioned in a larger like 5 to 10 years because we with the devices that I made we played with the devices around 3 years we don't know how it would behave in a long time right so I think we have a lot of things to consider and industry is very impatient obviously because they want innovative and new solutions to market yeah so thank you