Peter H. Jacobse

I am Peter Jacobse, a researcher, engineer, micronaut and carbon architect based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My resume can be found here. I am currently working at Rice University (Geoffroy Hautier group) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Alexander Weber-Bargioni group) after previous appointments at the University of California, Berkeley (Michael F. Crommie group) and Dartmouth College (Geoffroy Hautier group). I obtained my PhD in Nanomaterials science from Utrecht University (Ingmar Swart group).

I am a micronaut: someone who loves to explore (E, x, y, z)-space (and its Fourier counterparts in reciprocal space) of surfaces and molecules using scanning probe microscopy and hyperspectral analysis techniques. I am skilled in scanning probe microscopy (scanning tunneling (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM)) with more than a decade of experience and several tens of papers under my belt, and have a particular knack for ultra-high resolution mapping of structures, charge transport and electronic structure of materials, down to individual atoms and individual molecular orbitals. I am particularly interested in exploring quantum effects at different dimensionalities, such as 0D defects inside 1D or 2D materials such as graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs).

I am a carbon architect: someone who loves to build interesting structures; but my building blocks are atoms and chemical bonds instead of bricks and steel. I use chemical reactions instead of concrete to assemble the structures that I am interested in. Then, I zoom in on the new quantum mechanical properties that they exhibit. The nanostructures that I make are of interest for use in faster, smaller, smarter and more energy-efficient nanoelectronics, including spintronics and quantum computing. Recent breakthroughs in the realms of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are straining computational resources more than ever, and I am working hard on exploring the materials of the future to facilitate these developments. More recently, I have been exploring biomolecules on surfaces, like DNA.

My research at UC Berkeley focused on designing, building and analyzing carbon-based nanostructures on surfaces. One of my favorite materials is graphene nanoribbons - narrow strips of the wonder material graphene - which are excellent conductors of electricity. I have been at the forefront of developing strategies to engineer electron defects hosting spin and magnetic properties in nanoribbons and carbon-based lattices. Magnetism and spin are important ingredients for data storage, spintronics (a greener, more energy-efficient alternative to electronics) and quantum information science (QIS). I am currently continuing to pursue my work on quantum defects, but have expanded my horizon from carbon to all kinds of 1D and 2D materials.

I have been at the forefront of the development of techniques to improve the synthetic capabilities of carbon-based nanostructures. For example, I have pioneered matrix-assisted direct transfer, an important technique to bring polymers and macromolecules onto the surface and turn them into graphene nanoribbons, after they have been prepared by chemists. In addition, I have been at the forefront of turning carbon-based nanomaterials into actual devices that function as real transistors, and I have made steps in making new kinds of structures with different electronic properties.

My work combines insights from synthetic organic chemistry, theoretical and experimental physics, surface science, nanoscience, electrical and mechanical engineering. As such, I fulfill a very interesting, interdisciplinary role in academia/industry, where I am particularly comfortable collaborating with chemists, theoretical and experimental physicist, engineers, contractors and tech companies. I am passionate about my interdisciplinary research, my role as collaborator and interpreter between all these different people and perspectives, and my role as someone who is pushing the boundaries of science and technology.

Among my scientific achievements are the fabrication of nanoporous graphene (transistors) as well as new types of electronically functional graphene nanoribbon heterostructures and quantum dots. I have experimentally revealed the phenomenon of negative differential resistance in graphene nanoribbons. I have made and studied graphene nanoribbons with four-membered rings and five-membered rings, as well as magnetic nanoribbons. I am an expert on nitrogen doping in graphene nanoribbons. I have provided fundamental insights into the mechanisms of on-surface chemistry reactions through my work utilizing noncontact-AFM and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). I am an expert in graphene nanoribbon transport through my work on in-situ lifting/transport measurements and transport calculations. I have developed a software package in Mathematica for performing electronic structure calculations at the level of tight-binding/mean field Hubbard theory, called MathemaTB. I have developed new surface-synthesis techniques such as matrix-assisted direct (MAD) transfer, which vastly increased the scope of nanostructures accessible on surface. I have used MAD transfer in conjunction with protecting-group aided iterative synthesis (PAIS) to achieve, for the first time, the fabrication of fully monodisperse graphene nanoribbons with precisely predetermined length and monomer sequence.