Dresselhaus recounts work on energy-related materials
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Energy Quarterly
Dresselhaus recounts work on energyrelated materials Interviewed by Steve Yalisove
After a postdoctoral position at Cornell University, Mildred S. Dresselhaus found a position at MIT Lincoln Laboratories where she was told to choose a field of research different from what she had been pursuing previously. “That is actually very good advice to a young person starting a career,” Dresselhaus said, “because you bring new ideas to a field that you don’t know anything about.” Dresselhaus chose fundamental studies on graphite, and carbon specifically. This was in the 1960s when virtually no one was studying this topic and, Dresselhaus said, “Graphene was just a concept.” It would be decades later before graphene would receive notice with a Nobel Prize.
MRS BULLETIN: Where do you think graphene and carbon nanotubes may have an impact in energy? MILDRED S. DRESSELHAUS: Graphene is now very popular, yet it isn’t clear to me that graphene rather than carbon nanotubes might make it as the prime mover in energy applications or even batteries. Also, it’s very likely that the different carbon nanostructures will all have functions that will be complementary. In the 1960s at Lincoln Laboratories, we worked on the foundations of the fundamental theory of graphite. This led to the idea that maybe we could make single layers, but we didn’t know how to do this. Along came a group at Bell Labs in the 1960s who contacted me through correspondence and encouraged me to extend the work that we had done on graphite to the intercalation compounds based on graphite. An intercalation compound is made by inserting guest species between individual layers of graphite. So you could have one graphite layer and then a guest molecule that enlarged
the layer spacing, that would be like a single layer, or you could have two layers of graphite, or three, or four, before you reached a guest molecule. The number of layers before you reached a guest species would determine what we call “the stage.” At that time, we studied experimentally and theoretically the properties of graphite intercalation compounds up to stage 11, and after that, we couldn’t keep track of what stage it was anymore. The properties didn’t change much from one stage to another beyond stage 3, so that was essentially like infinity. We studied electrical properties, optical properties, magnetic properties, you name it, everything was game at that time. Do you think that intercalated compounds using graphite informed the people who did ion conduction of materials? Yes. The connection between graphite and energy became apparent in 1972 to the people in industry. The first application of intercalation compounds was to battery materials because they could put ions between the graphite layers—
Steve Yalisove, University of Michigan
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 38 • SEPTEMBER 2013
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www.mrs.org/bulletin • Energy Quarterly
charge—and then the discharge was to take the charge out. Charge and discharge was just like the operation of intercalation and de-intercalation. That pr
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