If you had to demonstrate your achievements from the past decade on the back of a postage stamp, you would probably say that’s impossible. Yet Professor Chennupati Jagadish and his research team within the Research School of Physics and Engineering at ANU could do so thousands of times.

While the work of Professor Chennupati Jagadish’s research team is microscopic in terms of what you can see, the benefits of this work to society will be monumental for years to come. They have been growing extremely small wires called nanowires, which can be used to make lasers and solar cells.

In the case of their solar cells, nanowires create a larger surface area than flat materials used in standard solar cells to collect more sunlight to convert into energy, achieving an improvement in energy efficiency.

Jagadish’s team recently developed some of the smallest nanowire lasers in the world. “We can put 10 lasers next to each other within the width of the human hair,” he says.

These tiny lasers can be used for enhanced medical applications, such as detecting human disease. They can also be used for faster, more sophisticated and more energy efficient mobile phones and laptops. “The applications are wide-ranging and that’s what is quite exciting,” Jagadish says.

His team published results of their breakthrough research on nanowire lasers in Nature Photonics, one of the top journals in the field.

During the past year, they have been exploring the use of nanowires in water splitting to create hydrogen, which is a potentially viable form of clean energy. The research project is supported by funding from the Australian Research Council.

“Our focus has changed towards energy, because it’s a global issue and nobody has got a simple solution,” Jagadish explains.

Hydrogen fuel could be used in transportation, for example, without emitting harmful gases into the atmosphere: the only by-product from this fuel would be water. However, the process to produce hydrogen is very energy and emissions intensive.

Jagadish’s concept promises zero emissions during the production process, as it relies on water and sunlight—both are clean energy sources. 

This kind of cutting-edge research—which combines the disciplines of physics, chemistry, material science and engineering—would be impossible for scientists like Jagadish if they were not able to conduct fundamental research.

“If you always focused on new technologies, it would be like trying to construct a building without foundations,” Jagadish says. “We started to work on nanowires 10 years ago, and we made the first nanowire laser 18 months ago. You need time to develop the core technologies and a good understanding of the physics in order to develop the new technologies.”

Ultimately, the return on this time investment has been considerable. Jagadish’s team has developed ideas and technologies that are improving the quality of people’s lives, while also reducing humanity’s environmental impact.

These ideas and technologies will need champions to take them to the next stage of development. That’s where Jagadish prides himself the most: training the next generation of scientists to continue the good work.

“In the process of doing the fundamental research and developing the next generation of technologies, training students is the most satisfying thing for me. They are going to change the world by developing new technologies and new industries that will benefit the community.”