Alex Zettl is an American professor of experimental condensed-matter physics. His research involving the properties of novel materials has produced significant advances in the field.
He is part of a Nanotechnology group at UCB, the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems He holds patents on the nanoradio, the nano mass sensor and other developments from this center's research. The research of Zettl, Kenneth Jensen, Jeff Weldon and Henry Garcia culminated in a single nanotube mounted on the tip of a metal electrode. When an electric current is passed between that nanotube and another, shorter, nanotube mounted nearby, an FM radio-frequency signal can be sensed by the nanotube, and the signal is converted into an audible signal without any other circuitry required. This remarkable phenomenon was first described in the November 2007 issue of Nano Letters, a monthly publication of the American Chemical Society. In that same issue, independent University of California, Irvine, researchers Peter Burke and Chris Rutherglen announced a similar result - sensing and demodulating an AM radio-frequency signal, although their apparatus included conventional circuitry for antenna and amplification. Alex Zettl is a well-known condensed-matter physicist with many significant contributions to the field. When he was at UCLA, he discovered the charge density wave and sliding CDW in several group of important materials. At the boom of high temperature superconductivity, Zettl also had some contribution in the study of superconductivity in carbon-based materials. After that, Zettl and his group focuses their efforts on nanotubes, namely carbon nanotubes and boron nitride nanotubes. Alex Zettl is the first one to demonstrate the synthesis of boron nitride nanotubes. Since then he has continued contributing to develop the fields. Recently Alex Zettl focuses more on two-dimensional materials, namely graphene, hexagonal boron nitride and metal dichalcogenide. His work includes atomic resolution of structure of graphene and h-BN, their defects and applications of 2-D materials. In 2015, Zettl was awarded R&D Award for the invention of Extended-Pressure Inductively Coupled Plasma system to large scale synthesis of high quality boron nitride nanotubes.
