What I can actually do at the bench

Thirteen years of hands-on work in three areas that keep coming back: growing carbon by chemical vapour deposition, patterning materials that resist being patterned, and measuring the result with a scanning probe.

Each section below has two halves. What I can do for you is the practical capability. Method development is what was new about it and why it was needed — for readers who care how it works. Papers and patents are linked as evidence throughout.

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CVD growth Nanolithography Scanning probe Spectroscopy & transport Technique index

01 · Growth

Chemical vapour deposition of carbon

Graphene, monolayer amorphous carbon, and single-walled carbon nanotubes — grown, not bought. I have built and tuned reactors, developed non-standard chemistries, and taken films from first deposit to a specification someone else has to meet.

Graphene CVD, including hydrogen-free routes. Ambient-pressure synthesis producing millimetre-scale single crystals via the Boudouard reaction — no hydrogen, no vacuum. Useful when the standard recipe is blocked by safety, cost, or substrate compatibility.
Layer-by-layer amorphous carbon growth. Atomically thin films with controlled thickness and no grain boundaries, which is what makes them viable as diffusion barriers and ultralow-k dielectrics.
Aerosol CVD of single-walled nanotubes. Spark-discharge generator design and reactor tuning to hit target diameter, length, and film conductivity — including the role of ex situ nucleation in controlling the product.
Growth on awkward substrates. Graphene directly on dielectrics, with percolation and coverage control rather than transfer-after-growth.
Diagnosing a reactor that isn't behaving. Most CVD problems are not the recipe. Reading the failure from the film rather than the log is the part that takes years.

Method development

Conventional graphene CVD needs hydrogen for etching and low pressure for uniformity, both of which constrain where it can be run. We used the Boudouard equilibrium — carbon monoxide disproportionating to carbon and CO₂ — as the carbon source instead. Because the equilibrium runs both ways, the system carries its own etching channel, and high crystal quality is reachable at ambient pressure with no hydrogen at all.

On the nanotube side the work was reactor engineering: a spark-discharge aerosol generator that decouples catalyst-particle formation from the growth zone, which is what lets you set diameter distribution independently of throughput.

Evidence 2022 · High-Quality Graphene Using Boudouard Reaction — Advanced Science 2021 · Method for producing graphene — WO 2021/002770 2019 · Fine-tuning of spark-discharge aerosol CVD for SWCNT growth — Chem. Eng. J. 2019 · Spark discharge generator for scalable aerosol CVD — Chem. Eng. J. 2026 · Graphene autocatalytic growth with percolation control — Results in Engineering

02 · Patterning

Advanced and gentle nanolithography

Electron-beam, optical, and AFM-based lithography — plus a decade spent on the harder problem: patterning materials that conventional resists, solvents, and plasma destroy before you can measure them.

Standard nanofabrication. Electron-beam and optical lithography, lift-off, etch, contact definition on 2D materials and thin films.
Biocompatible and water-processable resists. Chitosan-based lithography that patterns bio-organic and soft samples without organic solvents or plasma. Patented; first inventor.
Liquid-free patterning. Dry routes for nanotube films where any wet step collapses the network by capillary action.
AFM-based lithography. Direct mechanical and electrical patterning with a probe, including multicomponent van der Waals heterostructures — where you need to modify one layer without touching the ones beneath it.
Transfer, stacking, and assembly. Exfoliation and deterministic transfer of 2D materials; sub-percolating nanotube film transfer for thin-film transistor arrays.
Process selection advice. Given a fragile material and a target structure, which of the above will work and which will quietly ruin the sample.

Method development

The problem that started this: measuring charge transport along a single bacterial nanofilament requires electrodes patterned onto it, and every conventional resist process destroyed the filament first. Standard lithography assumes the sample tolerates acetone, elevated bake temperatures, and oxygen plasma. Biological and soft nanomaterials tolerate none of them.

The route out was a resist built from chitosan — a biopolymer that is water-soluble under mild acid and forms a patternable film. Development is aqueous, removal is aqueous, and the sample never sees an organic solvent. It became a patent, a family of "green lithography" processes, and eventually a review of the whole compatibility problem in Small.

The environmental argument arrived afterwards and turned out to be independently strong: the same process removes the solvent waste stream from a conventional lithography line.

Evidence 2021 · Green Lithography for Delicate Materials — Adv. Funct. Mater. 2021 · Use of chitosan compound in lithography — WO 2021/096394, first inventor 2022 · Gentle Patterning Approaches (review) — Small 2024 · Nanopatterning of multicomponent van der Waals heterostructures using AFM 2024 · Fast liquid-free patterning of SWCNT films — Chem. Eng. J. 2025 · Temporary tattoo transfer of sub-percolating SWCNT films for TFT arrays

03 · Metrology

Atomic force and scanning probe microscopy

Thirteen years on scanning probes, from building my own tips at ISSP RAS to teaching AFM practicals and giving invited talks on PeakForce methods. This is the technique I know best.

PeakForce QNM nanomechanics. Quantitative modulus, adhesion, and deformation mapping — the method behind the adhesion and overcoat work on amorphous carbon. Invited talk on its application to low-dimensional carbon.
Magnetic force microscopy. Including PeakForce MFM on magnetic nanostructures and vortex imaging in superconducting films.
Scanning tunnelling microscopy and electron-transport-correlated probe work.
Probe fabrication. Conductive carbon-nanotube SPM probes made in-house, fast and reproducibly — when commercial tips are not sharp, stiff, or conductive enough.
AFM as a fabrication tool, not just a camera: ultradensification of nanotube networks, mechanical patterning of heterostructures.
Imaging the difficult cases. Visualising graphene on non-conductive substrates using only standard mechanical channels — no conductive mode, no special substrate.
Reading someone else's data. A second opinion on existing scans, artefact identification, and whether a published number is supported by the image it came from.

Method development

My first paper was a probe-fabrication method. Commercial conductive tips were either too blunt or too fragile for the transport measurements we wanted, so we developed a fast, reliable route to attach carbon nanotubes to standard cantilevers. That set the pattern for everything since: when the instrument cannot do the measurement, modify the instrument.

Later work pushed AFM past imaging. Ultradensification uses the probe to locally compact a nanotube film, changing its optical and mechanical properties in a defined region — measurement and fabrication in the same tool, validated against mesoscopic simulation. More recently, standard mechanical channels turned out to be enough to locate graphene on dielectric substrates where optical contrast fails, removing a step from the usual workflow.

Evidence 2015 · Fast and reliable conductive CNT-probe fabrication for SPM — Rev. Sci. Instrum. 2022 · Local ultra-densification of SWCNT films — Carbon 2025 · Graphene visualisation on non-conductive substrates by mechanical AFM channels — Emergent Materials 2025 · Scanning vortex microscopy of pinning networks in Nb films — Communications Materials 2025 · Superior adhesion of monolayer amorphous carbon to copper — Adv. Mater. 2020 · Adhesion of SWCNT thin films with different materials — J. Phys. Chem. Lett.

04 · Supporting

Spectroscopy and transport

The measurements that turn a film into a number someone can design against.

Terahertz and infrared spectroscopy of thin films and networks — conductivity, carrier dynamics, and doping response in nanotube and carbon films.
Impedance spectroscopy down to single-object scale, including individual bacterial nanofilaments.
Charge transport and noise measurement on nanoscale devices.
In situ electrochemistry — lithium plating and stripping dynamics, electrocatalytic interfaces.
Dielectric characterisation, including the ultralow-k measurements underlying the interconnect work.

Method development

Impedance spectroscopy on a single bacterial nanofilament required both halves of this page at once: gentle lithography to place electrodes without destroying the sample, and a measurement careful enough to separate the filament's response from the water around it. The result — that charge transfer is water-mediated — only held up because the fabrication did not perturb what it was measuring.

That is generally the pattern. Most disputed measurements in this field are fabrication artefacts, and the people who can tell the difference are usually the ones who did both.

Evidence 2018 · Impedance spectroscopy of single bacterial nanofilament — PLOS ONE 2017 · Terahertz–infrared electrodynamics of SWCNT films — Nanotechnology 2018 · THz spectroscopy of charge transport in pristine and doped SWCNTs — Carbon 2026 · Atomically thin amorphous carbon with ultralow dielectric constant — Nature Electronics, accepted

Reference

Technique index

The short version, for scanning.

Graphene CVD: Ambient-pressure and hydrogen-free routes; millimetre-scale single crystals; growth on dielectrics
Amorphous carbon growth: Layer-by-layer atomically thin films, thickness control, no grain boundaries
Aerosol CVD of SWCNTs: Spark-discharge generation, reactor tuning, diameter and length control
Electron-beam lithography: Device definition on 2D materials and thin films
Optical lithography: Contact and mask-based patterning, lift-off, etch
AFM lithography: Mechanical and electrical probe patterning; van der Waals heterostructures
Biocompatible resists: Chitosan-based, aqueous develop and strip; patented
Liquid-free patterning: Dry routes for capillary-sensitive nanotube networks
2D transfer & stacking: Exfoliation, deterministic transfer, heterostructure assembly
PeakForce QNM: Quantitative modulus, adhesion and deformation mapping
Magnetic force microscopy: PeakForce MFM; vortex imaging in superconductors
Scanning tunnelling microscopy: Surface structure and local electronic characterisation
SPM probe fabrication: Conductive carbon-nanotube tips, in-house
THz & IR spectroscopy: Conductivity and carrier dynamics in films and networks
Impedance spectroscopy: Down to single-object scale; dielectric response
Transport & noise: Nanoscale device measurement and interpretation
In situ electrochemistry: Lithium plating and stripping; catalytic interfaces
Data & modelling: Python, C++, Java; analysis pipelines; experiment–simulation integration

Need one of these done, or checked?

Most engagements start with a short call to work out whether the technique fits the problem. If it doesn't, I will say so.

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