Rodney S. Ruoff

Accelerated Basic Science, AI/machine learning/robotics with materials and chemistry, carbon and boron nitride materials (fullerenes, CNTs, graphenes, diamond, porous carbons, others; and their BN and CBN analogs and variants); and liquid metal fluxes with dissolved first-row elements (particularly C, B, and N)

The work begins in the 1980s with laser and microwave spectroscopy of small molecules and weakly bound clusters. In the early 1990s, how fullerenes dissolve, and the nested carbon shells that form around metal-carbide crystals. Also in the early 1990s, how van der Waals attraction between adjacent multiwalled nanotubes flattens them along their contact, seen in the electron microscope, and how the same attraction makes single-walled nanotubes flatten against one another into a faceted packing in a nanotube crystal. From 1999, what a single carbon nanotube carries before it breaks, and how its nested shells slide within it, measured one tube at a time inside an electron microscope. Also from 1999, the tailoring of graphite into micrometre islands with the goal of obtaining single sheets. From 2003, how nanotubes and graphene behave in composites and films. In the 2000s, graphite oxide and its reduction, dispersions filtered into freestanding paper, and the growth of graphene on copper by chemical vapour deposition. In the 2010s, single-crystal metal foils and single-crystal graphene grown on them, boron nitride films and nanotubes, carbon electrodes for supercapacitors and batteries, and carbons that catalyse reactions without a metal. Most recently, diamane, diamond–metal interfaces, carbon in liquid metals, unseeded growth of diamond at one atmosphere pressure in a metal flux, and the mechanics of macroscopic single-crystal graphene.