NIU physicist Zhili Xiao recently received a three-year grant to continue researching superconductivity at the nanoscale.

NIU physicist Zhili Xiao, has 486,000 reasons to be happy while he works on his research.

Xiao was recently awarded a three-year grant, totaling $486,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue researching superconductivity at the nanoscale.

“I was very happy,” Xiao said. “As scientists we need the money to support our students to work on the project and we always have many, many ideas, but we need the manpower to do that. So the federal grants support that.”

Working with Xiao on his research are postdoctoral associate Jiong Hua and Ph.D. candidates Sevda Avci, Qiong Luo, Xiaoqiao Zeng and Sriharsha Panuganti.

As a graduate student in the department of chemistry, Zeng looks at the grant as a great opportunity to better the research and her future career.

“The grant for Dr. Xiao will improve our research greatly. We can get better facilities and equipment which are crucial for our research,” Zeng said. “It’s a big opportunity and a good beginning for me to become a scientist since I consider chemistry as my career in my life.”
Xiao conducts a portion of his research at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., which has state-of-the-art research facilities allowing for study at the nano-level, which is about 10,000 times smaller than the thinnest human hair.

“I have been working in superconductivity for 20 years now,” Xiao said. “Nano was very, very hard. It is hardest to start. It is very hard to see that small.”

When pure metals, such as copper, are cooled to a certain degree, they can begin to act as superconductors, Xiao explained. Using superconductors has benefits because they conduct electricity with no resistance or energy dissipation.

“In electrically-activated nano-devices of the future, the use of superconducting interconnects will be highly desirable, because they would circumvent the damaging heat produced by energy dissipation,” Xiao said in a press release.

The grant allows the researchers to continue their current research, which in the past has proved successful. Xiao and his researchers developed an ultra-fast hydrogen sensor that was named by R&D Magazine as one of the world’s top 100 scientific and technological innovations of 2005.

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