Dr. Gelu Costin, research scientist and manager of EEPS electron microprobe (EPMA) laboratory was part of the team that described a new material called “hematane”.  The news was first announced in Rice News in May of 2018, but recently were further recognized by IDTechEx in an announcement yesterday on Printed Electronics World.

IDTechEx provides market analysis on a broad range of advanced materials. Their technology analyst picks of “The Most Significant Material Science News of 2018” included hematane, nominated in the category “Advancement from Academia: Hematene (Rice University, May)”.

The material hematane was provided and chemically characterized by Costin in the EEPS EPMA lab, and described in a Nature Nanotechnology paper. The paper was lead by Rice researchers Aravind Puthirath Balan, Sruthi Radhakrishnan, Amey Apte, Carlos de los Reyes, Vidya Kochat, Robert Vajtai, Angel Martí and Gelu Costin. Rice alumnus Chandra Sekhar Tiwary contributed to the research.

Hematene created by a Rice University-led team is the first known two-dimensional non-van der Waals material. The transmission electron image shows a single sheet of hematene. Scale bar equals 0.5 microns. Courtesy of Shyam Sinha and Peter van Aken/Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, Germany