Last week, 2008 College alumnus Sujit Datta received the LeRoy Apker Award of the American Physical Society, the highest award that APS grants for undergraduate research.
The award consists of $5,000, a certificate of achievement and a trip to the APS meeting, where the two annual student awards are presented.
Datta, a graduate student at Harvard University, was rewarded for his research on a material called graphene, which consists of a single layer of carbon atoms and has many potential nanotechnological applications.
He discovered a way by which graphene can be carved into nanoscale structures with crystallographic edges and also studied how relativistic-charge carriers in few-layered graphene screen external electric fields, an effect that must be understood in order to use it in future generations of computer chips.
Each year, the seven APS finalists - which are nominated by physics departments across the country - receive certificates and $2,000.
The selected students travelled to Washington, D.C. about two weeks ago where they presented their research to a committee of physicists, who chose the winners.
"[Datta] took our department a little bit by storm," said Undergraduate Physics chairman and Datta's research adviser Charlie Johnson. "He is an amazingly smart and amazingly ambitious guy."
