Auburn materials engineering students have MXene research down to a fine art
Published: Jan 10, 2025 9:00 AM
By Jeremy Henderson
At this rate, Auburn may need to open its own "NanoArt" museum. Because the Department of Materials Engineering just keeps churning out masterpieces.
The latest award-winning contribution comes, once again, courtesy of microscope maestro Yeonjin Baek, one of the department's most recent doctoral graduates, and rising star of the so-called NanoArt competition circuit created by engineers and scientists celebrating the surprisingly artistic aspects of their research. Her medium? Once again, MXenes — a still relatively new class of 2D conductive crystalline nanomaterials promising battery storage breakthroughs, like giving your iPhone a full-day's charge in seconds or supplying juice to supercapacitors for millions of charging cycles.
Otherworldly images mined from MXenes have quickly become go-to graphics for NanoArt competitions since they were discovered at Drexel University in 2011; it turns out that, combined with a little Photoshop creativity, the results of throwing slices of, say, vanadium carbide under scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) can be downright stunning.
A year ago, Baek took home the grand prize in Japanese research technology company JEOL's annual scanning SEM image contest for a scan of a synthesized Vanadium oxide nano structure. Imagine a bouquet of flowers painted by impressionist Édouard Manet, but with the nearly unfathomable resolution of the materials engineering department's $500,000 JEOL JSM-7000F SEM).
Months later, her "MXene T-Rex," a scan of a layered niobium carbide resembling a Tyrannosaurus Rex 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair, won the October round of the same contest. Most recently — and, in terms of reflecting Auburn's rising materials engineering preeminence, perhaps most impressively — it placed second out of 300 submissions from 29 countries in the 9th annual NanoArtography competition sponsored by Purdue University's School of Materials Engineering and Drexel University's Nanomaterials Institute.
"I believe that materials engineering is essential for driving technological progress," said Baek, who recently accepted a postdoctoral research position at the University of Arizona. "What fascinates me most is how we can manipulate materials at the micro and nanoscale to innovate and improve various devices like electric vehicles and batteries.
"When we synthesize materials, they often appear as nothing more than dark gray or black powders. However, when observed under a microscope, we can uncover beautiful layered structures or unique nanoscale patterns. Materials like MXenes exhibit delicate accordion-like layered structures that make them particularly ideal for NanoArt. These structures showcase the texture and beauty of the nanoscale, providing a perfect canvas for creative interpretations."
Thanks the Department of Materials Engineering, Auburn's reputation for creative interpreations of the nanoscale has been at macro proportions for years.
Baek was actually Auburn's second grand prize winner in the JEOL contest. In 2017, materials engineering doctoral student Armin VahidMohammadi, who is now in product development at Tesla, snagged the blue ribbon with "Nano Nemo on the Water," a scan of a MXene designated Ti2C modified to resemble a clown fish. It was his second conquest in an epic string of victories that gained attention even outside the scientific community for primarily playing on pop culture.
A year before he found Nemo in titanium carbide, the avid Harry Potter fan's wildly vivid "Nano Lord Voldemort" placed first in the Materials Research Society’s Science as Art competition, an accomplishment repeated in 2018 after spotting "The MXene Turtle Under the Sea" in clouds of vanadium carbide. For his 2019 entry, he again used the force of the material engineering department's JSM-7000F to produce "MXene Yoda," a scan of oxidized 2-D V2CTx particles.
Win again, he did.
"It's been great for our students to receive this sort of attention for their creativity," said materials engineering program chair Bart Prorok, Baek's faculty advisor. "But I'd like to think it also reflects rather favorably on the research our department excels in. Right now a lot of that research is, obviously, in MXenes.
And, right now, Auburn students obviously have that research down to a fine art.
"While Armin was here, his research on MXenes was featured in Advanced Materials, which is a pretty prestigious journal," Prorok said. "But even though you could look at the nano artwork as a kind of novelty, thousands of materials scientists pay attention to a lot of these competitions. So, the artwork he and now Yeonjin have done has definitely helped us gain attention on our research, and it's attention I think Auburn deserves."
Yeonjin Baek poses in front of a display of "Flower Power," which won the grand prize in JEOL'S 2023 SEM Image Contest.
