[1] A. Rycerz, J. Tworzydlo, and C. W. J. Beenakker, EPL, 79, 57003 (2007)

Ville Vierimaa is a PhD student at the Department of Applied physics at Aalto University. He is part of the Quantum Many-Body Physics group, led by Ari Harju. He received his MSc from Aalto in early 2016 and is currently working on quantum transport calculations on graphene. The work is focused towards the spin and spin-dependent transport properties.

Naveen Kaushik is currently a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His research focuses on contact and doping strategies for transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), especially MoS2. He holds an M.Tech in solid state electronic materials from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, where he worked on TCAD simulations of FinFET-based SRAM circuits. He was awarded a Prime Minister Fellowship during his PhD given to the top 100 doctoral students by the government of India. He also got the Malhotra Weikfield national award for nanoscience in 2016 for his work done on TMDs. 

After my PhD in the theory of condensed matter group at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands), and having worked as a researcher in different locations in Europe on various topics in the field of theory of condensed matter, modelling and simulation, I am now back in the group where I did my PhD. My current research activities concentrate on graphene/2D systems, their (statistical-)mechanical properties, development of effective interatomic interaction models enabling large scale simulation.

1 Department of Chemistry, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark. 

2 State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Donghua University, Shanghai, China.

Mechanical actuators driven by water, which can timely respond to multiple stimuli with  a large deformation and can generate high stress, have promising applications in artificial muscles, motors, and electromagnetic generators. However, matching all these requirements in a single device remains a challenge. In this talk, I present an attempt of fabricating low-cost graphene nanomaterial based construct that enables to undergo reversible deformation with high performance [1, 2]. The device is based on monolayered graphene papers consisting of gradient hybrid reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and graphene oxide (GO) components. The overall fabrication procedure can be carried out at room temperature with economical, scalable, and environmentally friendly advantages. A functional device ("Graphene Origami") composed of this graphene paper can (i) adopt predesigned shapes, (ii) walk, and (iii) turn a corner. These processes can be remote-controlled by gentle light or heating. It is believed that this self-folding material holds potential for a wide range of applications such as sensing, artificial muscles, and robotics.

I received my Ph.D from Donghua University, China in 2014. I am currently a H.C. Ørsted-Marie Curie research fellow at DTU, Denmark. My research focuses on design, three-dimensional assembly and property of stimuli-responsive graphene-based hybrids and nanomaterials. The potential applications of these new materials as electronic skin, micro-reactors, artificial muscle and three-dimensional biological scaffolds have been systematically investigated. Over 20 of my research articles on this topic have been published on Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Nano Energy, Scientific Reports, Nanoscale, Journal of Materials Chemistry, Carbon etc. Relative publications have been highlighted by Nature, Science, C&EN, MaterialsViewsChina and etc.

Julio Gomez is the Founder of AVANZARE, company producer of graphene and other 2D materials and its composites . He is primarily interested in the mechanical properties of atomically thin materials such as graphene. He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1995), receiving the  and a Ph.D. in Chemistry (2000) from University of La Rioja where he studied the preparation and electrical and optical properties of nanosize metallic clusters,  and a postdoctoral researcher position in the Laboratoire de Synthèse Organique, University of Nantes-CNRS  After finishing his Ph.D, he spent 3 years as assistant Professor in Universidad de La Rioja and 2 years as an Area Manager in the research centre CIDETEC studying electrochemical systems before joining AVANZARE at the end of 2004. His awards include among others the best B.S. degree in Chemistry in 1995 award in the University Complutense de Madrid, the best PhD degree in Science and Technology award in the University of La Rioja from the years 1999-2000, National award Entrepreneur of the year 2008 in Spain, best product NANOAWARDS 2008 (USA), F&S best practices in innovation 2013 (UK). Author of 43 papers H-index 22.

Lapo Bogani is currently ERC and Royal Society group leader at the University of Oxford. He is primarily interested in the magnetic and electronic properties of nanoscale devices, with particular attention to the integration of molecular magnetic systems in nanoelectronic devices. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Florence, Italy (2006) working on the magnetic properties of one-dimensional materials. The then Moved to CNRS Grenoble with an individually-driven Marie Curie fellowship, where he was one of the main proponents of molecular spintronic systems (2009) using carbon nanomaterials. He then received the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja research prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, which he developed at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He joined the faculty at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford, in 2015. His awards and distinctions include, among the others, the Burghen award of the European Academy of Sciences, the Olivier Kahn prize for molecular magnetism, the Nasini and Semerano prizes of the Italian Chemical Society and the Nicholas Kurti European Science Prize. His personal grants include, among others, the Marie Curie and Royal Society research fellowships and the Sofja Kovalevskaja and ERC Starting grants.

The rapidly increasing device densities in electronics calls for efficient thermal management. If successfully exploited, graphene, which possesses extraordinary thermal properties, can be commercially utilized to produce polymer composites with ultrahigh thermal conductivity (TC). The total potential of graphene to enhance TC, however, is restricted by the large interfacial thermal resistance between the polymer-mediated graphene boundaries [1] We report a facile and scalable dispersion of commercially available graphene nano platelets (GnPs) in a polymer matrix, which forms composite with ultra-high TC of 12.4 W/mK (vs. 0.2 W/mK for the neat polymer) [2] This ultra-high TC is achieved by applying high compression forces during the dispersion that results in the closure of gaps between adjacent GnPs with large lateral dimensions and low defect densities. We also found strong evidence for a thermal percolation threshold. Finally, the addition of electrically insulating nano-boron nitride to the thermally conductive GnP-polymer composite significantly reduces its electrical conductivity (to avoid short circuit) and synergistically increases the TC [3] The efficient dispersion of commercially available GnPs in polymer matrix provides the ideal framework for substantial progress toward the large-scale production and commercialization of GnP-based thermally conductive composites.

1. Shtein, M., Pri Bar, I., Varenik, M., Regev, O., Anal. Chem. 2015, 87, 4076-4080.
2. Shtein, M., Nadiv, R., Buzaglo, M., Kahil, K., Regev, O., Chem. Mater. 2015, 27 2100.
3. Shtein, M., Nadiv, R., Buzaglo, M., Regev, O., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2015, 7, 23725.

Oren Regev is currently a full Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is primarily interested in the dispersion of nanocarbons and their application. He received his PhD in 1992 from the Technion, IIT and was a visiting scientist in Lund, Eindhoven and Texas A&M universities. He has published over 100 papers (>3000 citations) and two patents.

Experimentally produced graphene sheets exhibit a wide range of mobility values. Both extrinsic charged impurities and intrinsic ripples (corrugations) have been suggested to induce long-range disorder in graphene and could be a candidate for the dominant source of disorder. Here, using large-scale molecular dynamics and quantum transport simulations, we find that the hopping disorder and the gauge and scalar potentials induced by the ripples are short-ranged, in strong contrast with predictions by continuous models, and the transport fingerprints of the ripple disorder are very different from those of charged impurities. We conclude that charged impurities are the dominant source of disorder in most graphene samples, whereas scattering by ripples is mainly relevant in the high carrier density limit of ultraclean graphene samples (with a charged impurity concentration < 10 ppm) at room and higher temperatures.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.03715, submitted to Physical Review Letters

Ari Harju leads a Quantum many-body physics group at Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. The group is part of an Academy of Finland Center of Excellence. He has authored 100+ international peer-reviewed journal articles, including high-rank journals like Nature Physics.