Duke Research Group Shares Annual Faraday Horizon Prize

A national group of researchers including students, postdocs and faculty members from Duke University’s Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science has been recognized for their years-long contributions to a larger effort to develop novel semiconductor materials that can control spin, charge and light within an electronically active material platform.

The recognition comes in the form of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Faraday Horizon Prize. The annual award is given for significant recent novel discoveries or advances made in the area of physical chemistry.

The Duke MEMS group is part of CHOISE, the Center for Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy. CHOISE brings together world-leading experts from nine institutions to enable new insights and advances not otherwise possible in spin dynamics, hot-carrier utilization and light emission. The large team is an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Semiconductors underpin modern electronics through their ability to manipulate charge transport and light emission, yet they traditionally lack convenient access to the electron’s spin degree of freedom, which is typically controlled only in magnetic materials.

Chirality – the existence of left‑ and right‑handed molecular forms – offers a powerful symmetry‑based route to spin selectivity. By embedding chirality directly into a semiconductor material, the team established a system in which molecular handedness governs the behavior of charge carriers and their spin.

Their work introduces chiral semiconductors as a fundamentally new paradigm for spin‑dependent optoelectronics, enabling spin control without magnetic fields or magnetic materials. The Duke team has constantly been pursuing rationally designed, new nanostructured materials with even better properties as well as a predictive computational understanding of how the properties arise.

Contributions to these efforts from the Duke MEMS team include an atomic-scale understanding of how chiral molecular components transfer chiral symmetry to inorganic semiconductor components. They also helped develop a quantitative link between atomic structure and spin-properties of electron-like carriers in the materials. Along with these fundamental insights, the team has made many contributions to translating these insights into enhanced function within real-world materials.

The full CHOISE team within the Pratt School of Engineering includes the groups of David Mitzi, the Simon Family Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science ; Volker Blum, the Rooney Family Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science; and Adrienne Stiff-Roberts, professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Additional researchers who have contributed to the chirality-related work of CHOISE now recognized by RSC include:

• Rayan Chakraborty, a postdoctoral researcher with the team who is now a postdoctoral associate at the University of Pittsburgh
• Manoj Jana, a postdoctoral researcher with the team who is now a senior process engineer with Applied Materials
• Gabrielle Koknat, a MEMS PhD student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratory
• Jack Morgenstein, a MEMS undergraduate student who is now a graduate student at Princeton
• Xixi Qin, a Materials Science PhD student who is now a postdoctoral associate at Stanford University
• Ruyi Song, a Chemistry PhD student who is now a senior researcher at DP Technology
• Yi Xie, a Materials Science PhD student who is now a postdoctoral researcher with the Mitzi group.