Prof. Parag Banerjee of Washington University in St. Louis

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) continues to challenge our understanding of surface reactions with new chemistries and enabling applications where atomically precise layers significantly improve performance of devices. In this talk, I will first describe the work our group has conducted understanding the role of configurational entropy of adsorbed molecules in determining surface reactions in ALD that lead to growth of films one monolayer at a time. I will then describe several case studies where ALD provides the ideal process platform to characterize surfaces and develop new nanomaterials. Examples will highlight use of single monolayer passivation of surfaces, second-harmonics to study metal-induced gap states, extraction of plasmonically generated hot electrons from gold nanorods and development of transparent conducting zinc oxides with quenched point-defects.

Biography:

Professor Parag Banerjee joined Washington University in St. Louis as faculty in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department in July 2011. Prior to this appointment, he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Gary Rubloff at the University of Maryland, College Park in Materials Science & Engineering. From 2000 to 2006, he was a R&D process engineer at Micron Technology Inc. Professor Banerjee's current work uses ALD as a key technological platform to understand and control charge transport across material interfaces with applications in photodetection and photon harvesting. His work is supported by Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

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