Long Ju

The magic of carbon atoms is that different permutations and combinations can form materials with completely different properties. They can form a flat hexagonal ring structure and stack together to become an interesting material: graphite.

What would happen if the carbon atoms became two-dimensional? The result is graphene, an even more interesting material that leads to a field on which physicists have spent decades studying. Simply speaking, graphite is a single carbon atomic layer plane, a two-dimensional material.

Dr. Long Ju, an assistant professor from the Department of Physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has revealed more about the new physical properties and applications of graphene materials through cross-field experimental methods such as fusion of optics, micro-device processing, and electrical transport measurement in recent years.

In 2011, Long pioneered the graphene plasmon research and first demonstrated the fundamental properties of tunable plasmons of a relativistic electron in graphene. This work is the very first experimental demonstration of plasmon properties in graphene. It opened up a whole new field for plasmonics and TeraHertz research. Long designed and fabricated graphene micro-ribbon arrays that enable direct optical excitation of the tunable plasmon resonances over broad terahertz and infrared spectroscopy and demonstrated for the first time the extraordinarily strong and tunable light-plasmon coupling in graphene.

In 2015, another one of Long’s work was again reported by Nature and many mainstream physics media. He and his colleagues were able to experimentally observe, for the first time, ballistic conducting channels of such quantum valley Hall insulators at bilayer graphene (BLG) domain walls.

At present, he is leading a research group to work on new experimental methods to detect some very important topics in the graphene 2.0 era. Just as the 2.0 era of 2D materials has just started, Long is actually in a relatively early stage of his independent research career. At this stage, his biggest hope is to finish building up his research group as soon as possible and transition to a more stable scientific research stage.