Li is a staff physicist in Oak Ridge National Laboratory with an Adjunct Professor appointment in The University of Tennessee. Before joining ORNL in 2002, he held a Senior R&D Scientist position in Galian Photonics Inc. He obtained his PhD degree in physics from Peking University in 1997 and worked on nano-porous alumina as a Max-Planck-Society Fellow in Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics from 1997 to 1999. He has published 50 papers that have been cited more than 1,900 times. His current research interest is electrical transport and novel functionalities in nanostructured materials.

 

报告摘要：Four-probe STM is a “nano” version of a conventional four-probe station; it combines STM local imaging and spectroscopy functions with four-point contact electrical transport capability in a well-controlled sample environment at temperatures down to 8 K.In this talk, I will give a brief overview on the capabilities of ORNL four-probe STM, and then provide a couple of examples to demonstrate how we are using this unique platform to study the distribution and flow of electrons over multiple length scales, from individual atoms, molecules, to nanostructures and mesoscopic systems. My focus will be on the measurements of individual grain boundary resistance in copper interconnect nanowires and the one-dimensional metallic conductance stabilized by interwire coupling in ultra narrow silicide nanowires grown on a silicon surface. The goal of this research is to establish the relationship between transport functionalities and local structural and electronic properties down to atomic scale. This research was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, and published in Nano Letters, 10, 3096 (2010), Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.(PNAS), 101, 5272 (2010), and Nature Materials, 7, 539 (2008).