Xiao Cheng Zeng

The Lord of the Nanorings, Nebraska Ice and Gold Buckyballs are just a few of Xiao Cheng Zeng's discoveries at Nebraska.

This Ameritas University Professor of chemistry at UNL has also been named a fellow of the American Physical Society. Election to the fellowship is limited to no more than one-half of 1 percent of the society's membership. He also won the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2004.

Zeng's research has focused on computational and theoretical studies of liquids, solids, thin films, interfaces, nanotubes and nanoclusters, with further interest in computational nanotribology and modeling of atomic force microscopy.

Zeng's work has been published in major scientific journals five times in as many years, and his most recent published discovery, of golden cagelike structures - "gold buckeyballs" -- earned international acclaim. Zeng and his colleagues in the June 2006 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' online edition reported evidence of the first free-standing hollow cage structure composed of clusters of pure metal atoms. Scientists might someday be able to harness these truly tiny cages to carry useful guest atoms for medical or industrial purposes.

Zeng's team was the first to combine quantum chemistry calculations with a powerful computerized search technique to identify previously unknown nanoscale structures and substances. Using UNL's PrairieFire supercomputer, together with computers in the chemistry department, they applied their combined technique to generate many theoretical fingerprints of the gold clusters' structure.

Zeng and his team earlier used PrairieFire to create models of silicon tubes less than 1 nanometer in diameter. They modeled nanotubes in hexagonal, pentagonal and square configurations and in the process, they found the thinnest known nanotube -- the square configuration at less than 0.5 nanometer in diameter. More importantly, when they used the quantum mechanical method to analyze the tubes, they found that they are very likely to be conductors.

That "Lord of the Nanorings" discovery is a ring of 20 boron atoms that is so stable that the rings can be stacked to create a tube of virtually any length with a diameter of a mere 2.6 nanometers (2.6 billionths of a meter).

Zeng's most recent public attention came from a December 2006 publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He and his team discovered self-assembling nano-ice that forms a double-helix structure much like DNA. The double helixes of ice molecules that resemble the structure of DNA self-assemble under high pressure inside carbon nanotubes. This discovery could have major implications for scientists in other fields who study the protein structures that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and bovine spongiform encephalitis (mad cow disease). It could also help guide those searching for ways to target or direct self-assembly in nanomaterials and predict the kind of ice future astronauts will find on Mars and moons in the solar system.