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Gregory Rutter Wins Best Thesis Award for CNST Research

Dr. Gregory Rutter, an NRC Postdoctoral Research Associate in the CNST, has won a Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the Georgia Institute of Technology chapter of Sigma Xi. A plaque, certificate, and cash award were presented to Dr. Rutter in Atlanta, Georgia on April 6, 2009. Dr. Rutter's thesis, "Atomic Scale Properties of Epitaxial Graphene Grown on SiC(0001)," was completed under the direction of Professor Phillip First in the School of Physics. The majority of the research was performed at the CNST under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Stroscio, who is now his postdoctoral advisor. Dr. Rutter's thesis research focused on epitaxial graphene created on SiC(0001) by annealing in vacuum. Such graphene offers the possibility of large-scale production and deterministic patterning for nanoelectronics applications. He performed sequential scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) in ultrahigh vacuum at temperatures of 4.2 K and 300 K. His atomic-scale studies addressed the growth, interfacial properties, stacking order, and quasiparticle coherence in epitaxial graphene, resulting in six publications to date, including two in Science. For his NRC Postdoctoral Research in the CNST, Dr. Rutter is using low temperature STM to study the dynamics of atom manipulation, the properties of dilute magnetic semiconductors, and the electronic properties of graphene.

Released April 16, 2009, Updated January 24, 2023