Venkataraman is an alum of MIT, Harvard.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Led by Indian American scientist Latha Venkataraman, a team of researchers at Columbia Engineering have created an electronic diode the size of a single molecule that performs 50 times better than all prior diode designs.
Their findings — which could have real-world applications in regards to nanotechnology — were published on May 25 in the paper, “Single-Molecule Diodes with High On-Off Ratios through Environmental Control,” via the Nature Nanotechnology journal.
“It’s amazing to be able to design a molecular circuit, using concepts from chemistry and physics, and have it do something functional,” Venkataraman said in a statement provided by the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. “This goal … represents the ultimate in functional miniaturization that can be achieved for an electronic device.”
With electronic devices getting smaller with every batch that rolls off the line, the field of molecular electronics has become more critical in solving the problem of further miniaturization, and single molecules represent the theoretical limit of how small nanotechnology could go.
“Our experiments provide a deeper understanding of the fundamental physics of electron transport, while laying the groundwork for technological advances at the nanometer scale,” Venkataraman wrote.
The idea of creating a single-molecule diode was suggested by Arieh Aviram and Mark Ratner who theorized in 1974 that a molecule could act a one-way conductor of electric current, according to Phys.org. Researchers have been exploring the charge-transport properties of molecules ever since.
Aside from single-molecule transport and mechanics, the Columbia Engineering portal indicates Venkataraman also specializes in electron transport at the nano-scale and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. She received a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of technology in 1993 and a Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard in 1999.
Furthermore, the associate professor has won numerous awards while in the service of academia, including the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 2008, the Kim Award for Faculty Involvement at Columbia University in 2010, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011.
2 Comments
Brilliant! And to all my fellow Indians feeling proud as peacocks at this achievement, don’t bother. The lady, though highly accomplished, ain’t an Indian by a long shot. She’s Indian origin. And our newspapers are truly annoying; anyone in the US with some success, and happens to be even a twentieth generation of Indian ancestry…is automatically considered Indian.
Truly hypocritical.
Columbia Engineering school is just amazing. So many fantastic discoveries coming from there.