May 2018: KIC members Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak are experts on atomically thin materials, particularly their optical and electronic properties. They are also married and were recruited to Cornell last year through the provost’s NEXT Nano Initiative. They moved their shared lab and joint research group to Ithaca and have been up and running in the Physical Sciences Building since January, where they also manage the KIC facility.

May, 2018:  KIC congratulates Executive Committee member Héctor Abruña on being elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Abruña is one of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates elected to NAS in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

April, 2018: KIC members Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak have become the first to control atomically thin magnets with an electric field, a breakthrough that provides a blueprint for producing exceptionally powerful and efficient data storage in computer chips, among other applications. The research is detailed in the paper, "Electric-field switching of two-dimensional van der Waals magnets," published March 12 in Nature Materials.

March, 2018: In a study published March 8 in Science, KIC co-Director David Muller, in collaboration with University of Chicago scientists, revealed a technique to “sew” two patches of crystals seamlessly together to create atomically thin fabrics. 

March 2018: KIC members Grace Xing, Debdeep Jena and David Muller are among a team of Cornell researchers that have successfully devised a semi-conductor-superconductor crystal featuring gallium nitride (GaN) grown directly only a crystal of niobium nitride (NbN), a proven superconductor material used in many applications, including quantum communications and astronomy.  Their research was published online March 8 in Nature.

Feb 2018: Recent work from the lab of Lena Kourkoutis, KIC member and Assistant Professor of Applied & Engineering Physics, describes a new approach to characterizing and understanding exotic charge-ordered phases in manganite, shedding light on the material’s structure changes where the “fun” happens- at super cold temperatures.

January, 2018: A KIC research team comprised of co-Directors Paul McEuen & David Muller, member Itai Cohen, and Postdoctoral Fellow Marc Miskin have built the 'muscle' for an electricity-conducting, environment-sensing, shape-changing machine the size of a human cell. Their work is outlined in "Graphene-based Bimorphs for Micron-sized, Autonomous Origami Machines," published Jan. 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

December, 2017: KIC co-Director David Muller and his research collaborators have discovered a method for basically inserting a 1-D semiconductor channel into the "fabric" of a 2-D materials. The electronic band structures of these channels exhibit the proprieties necessary for future electronics applications.  This research was published in Nature Materials. 

Nov. 2017: KIC members and postdocs explore the optical properties of single-atom-thick layers of graphene and report clear observations of exitons in bilayer graphene.  The research by Paul McEuen, Farhan Rana, Long Ju and Lei Wang (all affiliated with KIC) was published in Science on Nov 17, 2017. 

Nov. 2017: KIC members Darrell Schlom and Kyle Shen address a decades-old mystery of "missing electrons." Their work is detailed in a paper, "Lifshitz transition from valence fluctuations in YbAl3," published Oct. 11 in Nature Communications.