If he succeeds, she may see the results of his efforts in her work. As fascinated as she is by her studies in the Antarctic, Heather Lynch knows the stakes are high for her husband Matthew Eisaman’s work.

“These days, ecologists like myself are often just carefully documenting environmental decline, and predicting how quickly or slowly a species will go extinct,” Lynch offered in response to emailed questions. “The work that [Eisaman] does will actually solve the problem.”

Indeed, as a physicist in the Sustainable Energy Technologies Department at BNL and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, Eisaman is focused on improving the efficiency of reusable energy sources, particularly solar cells.

It is through this effort that Eisaman made a compelling discovery recently that may have implications outside the world of reusable energy.

Eisaman worked with a team of scientists at BNL and the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic on a process related to graphene, which is a two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms that is one atom thick.

Eisaman was working on a process called doping in which scientists add or take away electrons. Doping is one way to control how graphene behaves at junctions with semiconductors. Eisaman set up an experiment to explore a way to make n-doping, which adds electrons to graphene, more efficient.

The team at SUNY Polytechnic built a product on top of a sodium lime substrate, which is an ingredient in household glass and windows. Eisaman layered graphene on top of that. He had planned to add other chemicals to dope the graphene.

“Before we doped it, we took a baseline measurement,” Eisaman said. “It looked like it was strongly n-doped, which we didn’t expect.” He followed this up with a series of other experiments, using the facilities at BNL including the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, at SUNY Poly and in his lab. “The whole study was really a team effort requiring many different areas of expertise.”

Eisaman believes this discovery was promising for solar cells and other possible technological advances. He plans to explore the fundamentals of the doping mechanism. He would like to understand how the chemical environment of the sodium affects the doping strength. He is also studying how the doping and other electronic properties of the graphene vary with the number of graphene layers.

Eisaman said one challenge to making this doping process work is that most semiconductor properties would change, mostly for the worse, if scientists tried to diffuse sodium through it. A possible solution is to deposit a material on top of the graphene that has a sufficiently high surface density of sodium. While this material would donate electrons to the graphene, it would not diffuse into the semiconductor as long as the temperatures of the deposition process were low enough, Eisaman suggested. He is currently working on this.

Since the paper came out in Scientific Reports in February, Eisaman said he has had inquiries from scientists and from a company that might want to use their discovery. He is “actively looking for funding and partnerships to help push this forward,” he said.

Eisaman has three Ph.D. candidates in his lab and he usually adds two to four undergraduate researchers in the summer. While this group will continue to develop technology that will seek ways to find applications of graphene doping techniques, Eisaman will continue with the bread and butter work in his lab: improving the efficiency of reusable energy alternatives.

In another set of experiments, Eisaman collaborated with Charles Black, a scientist and group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Black and Eisaman worked on how to use the same anti-reflective properties in moth eyes to reduce the amount of light that escapes from a solar cell through reflections.

Black constructed structures that mimicked these properties. The structure worked even better than expected.

“Based on our limited knowledge of optics, which is [Eisaman’s] expertise, we couldn’t understand why they seemed to be doing better than we thought they should,” Black said. Eisaman’s complementary ability to model the optical properties of the material on the computer allowed them to see a “subtlety that escaped us. In the end, he figured out what was going on.” Black and Eisaman are continuing to work together to create a better structure.

Eisaman and Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department  of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook, have a 6-year old daughter Avery. They live in Port Jefferson, where they have had solar panels on their house for over a year.

The couple, who met when they were undergraduates at Princeton, discuss their work “constantly,” Lynch noted. “Sometimes, we sit and brainstorm how to solve the world’s energy problems, by which I mean that I throw out crazy ideas and [Eisaman] patiently explains why they wouldn’t work or why they don’t scale well.”

Eisaman, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said he appreciates being close to the water, where he and Lynch have enjoyed kayaking since they moved to Long Island in 2011. Eisaman and Lynch are recreational runners and try to run two marathons each year: the Pineland Farms Trail Race in Maine and the Hamptons Marathon.

As for his work, Eisaman said he feels a sense of urgency. “One of the most pressing problems we’re facing is to meet our energy goals in the next 10 to 20 years.”

More than a decade ago, Dmitri Kharzeev came up with an idea he thought he should find in nature. Many such concepts come and go, with some, like the Higgs boson particle, taking over 50 years to discover.

After working with numerous collaborators over the years, the professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory found proof.

“This was absolutely amazing,” said Kharzeev. “You think an idea in your head, but whether or not it’s realized in the real world is not at all clear. When you find it in the laboratory on a table top experiment, it’s pretty exciting.”

The discovery triggered a champagne party in Kharzeev’s Port Jefferson home, which included collaborators such as Qiang Li, a physicist and head of the Advanced Energy Materials Group at Brookhaven, and Tonica Valla, a physicist at BNL, among others. “There was a feeling that something new is about to begin,” Kharzeev said.

Kharzeev’s idea was that an imbalance in particles moving with different projections of spin on momentum generates an electric current that flows with resistance. That resistance drops in a magnetic field that the scientists hope can reach zero, which would give their material superconducting properties.

A particle’s projection of spin on momentum is its chirality. The magnetic field aligns the spins of the positive and negative particles in opposite directions. When the scientists applied an electric field, the positive particles moved with it and the negative ones moved against it. This allows the particles to move in a direction consistent with their spin, which creates an imbalance in chirality.

The chiral magnetic effect can enable ultra-fast magnetic switches, sensors, quantum electricity generators and conventional and quantum computers.

Kharzeev had expected this kind of separation for particles at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, where he figured he might observe the separation for quarks in the quark-gluon plasma.

Instead, he and his colleagues, including co-author Li, discovered this phenomenon with zirconium pentatelluride, which is in a relatively new class of materials called Dirac semimetals, which were created in 2014. Their paper was published in Nature Physics earlier this year.

The particles had to be nearly massless to allow them to move through any obstacles in their path. Particles that collided with something else and changed their direction or chirality would create resistance, which would reduce conductivity.

Genda Gu, who is in the Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Sciences Department at BNL, grew the zirconium pentatelluride crystals in his laboratory. Gu “is one of the best crystal growers in the world and he has managed to grow the cleanest crystals of zirconium pentatelluride currently available,” said Kharzeev.

Gu said he collaborates regularly with Li. This, however, was the first time he worked with Kharzeev. He called the work “fruitful and productive” and said the crystals had “generated a number of exciting scientific results.”

The materials they worked with have a wide range of potential applications. The semimetals strongly interact with light in the terahertz frequency range, which is a useful and unique property, Kharzeev suggested. Terahertz electromagnetic radiation, which is called T-rays, can be used for nondamaging medical imaging, including the diagnosis of cancer and high-speed wireless communications.

To be sure, there are limitations to zirconium pentatelluride. For starters, it only displays this chiral magnetic effect at temperatures below 100 degrees Kelvin, or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which is on par with the best high-temperature semiconductors, but still well below room temperature. Its chirality is also only approximately conserved, so the resistance does not drop all the way to zero.

Another hurdle is that scientists have to improve the technique for growing thin films of this material. While it is possible, it will take considerable research and development, Kharzeev said. He hopes to find a material that will exhibit chiral magnet effects at room temperature.

Kharzeev has received interest from companies and other researchers but said “we have a lot of work to do before we can create practical devices” based on this effect. He hopes scientists will create such products within the next five to ten years.

There are numerous potential uses for zirconium pentatelluride and other similar materials, including in space, where temperatures remain low enough for these quasi-particles.

“You could envision this on space stations to generate electricity from sunlight,” Kharzeev said. When he saw the movie “The Martian,” Kharzeev said he thought about how thermoelectrics could power a station on the Red Planet.

“If we managed to increase the temperature at which the chiral magnetic effect is present just a little, by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, our thermoelectric would be even more efficient,” he said.

Kharzeev, who grew up in Russia and moved to Long Island in 1997, appreciates the beauty and comforts of the area.

“The combination of Stony Brook, BNL and Cold Spring Harbor Lab makes Long Island one of the best places in the world to do science,” he said. He also loves the beaches and the ocean and plays tennis at the Port Jefferson Country Club.

As for his collaborations, Kharzeev is excited by the work ahead with a material he didn’t envision demonstrating these superconducting properties when he came up with this concept in 2004.

When he learned of the work Li was doing with zirconium pentatelluride, Kharzeev “rushed” into his lab. “It appeared that even though he and his group were not thinking about the chiral magnetic effect at the time, they had already set up an experiment that was perfect for this purpose,” Kharzeev said. They “even had a preliminary result that literally made my heart jump.”

When a successful chef mixes ingredients, he changes the proportions of nutmeg to cinnamon or of parsley to oregano. He’s much more likely to focus on how the final product affects the flavor than he is the way the ingredients mix.

That’s not the case for Jurek (pronounced Yoo rek) Sadowski. Although he’s not a chef, the staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) would like to understand how some of the smallest pieces of organic metal complexes come together when they go through a process called self-assembly.

“I’m not only interested in obtaining the recipe for making these [products], but I’m also interested in understanding how and why things happen in these conditions on a more basic level,” Sadowski said.

Working with the low-energy electron microscope, Sadowski is a part of a team at the CFN that is involved in seeing and interpreting changes that occur on an atomic scale.

Sadowski has collaborated on environmental products that can remove greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the air. This research helps understand how these self-assembled organic compounds develop pores of different sizes that can trap greenhouse gases.

The size of the pores works like a fishing net designed to catch the equivalent of Goldilocks gases from the air. Some gases pass right through them, while others bounce off without getting trapped. Then there are those, like carbon dioxide, that fit perfectly in the small spaces between the organic pieces.

In putting these products together, Sadowski asks what he needs to do to make the process more efficient and more selective.

The CFN is a user facility, which means that scientists around the world can benefit from the high level of technical expertise Sadowski possesses. He has worked with scientists from Columbia, Yale, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SUNY facilities as well as visitors from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Japan.

Researchers who have worked with Sadowski suggested that his scientific and technical knowledge make him a particularly effective collaborator.

The low-energy electron microscope is a “very complicated instrument,” said Richard Osgood, the Higgins professor emeritus of electrical engineering and applied physics at Columbia University, who has collaborated for years with Sadowski. “You don’t just go in and turn a dial: it’s much more complicated than that. You have to tune things up.”

Working with Sadowski greatly lowers the cost of research because he can “do something in a couple of days” that might otherwise take a graduate student or other researcher a half a year or more to figure out,” Osgood said.

Sadowski said some of the products that use self-assembly include wearable electronics, such as solar cells or clothing, or wearable medical devices.

Sadowski divides his time about equally between pursuing his own research and working with others at the CFN.

Sadowski runs his own experiments mostly in a vacuum, where he varies the temperature and the density of the molecules he’s using.

Sadowski is planning to give a talk in March at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore about his work.

“It’s important to understand how the molecules self-assemble themselves on the surface,” he said. “We can utilize self-assembly for further advances.”

For about five years, Sadowski has helped plan the creation of a new beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. That beamline, which will be called the electron spectro-microscopy beamline, will be completed later this year. The beamline will use a microscope that the CFN is contributing, which will help provide structural, chemical and electronic maps of surfaces with a resolution of a few nanometers.

“We will have a much more extended capability for studying chemical reactions as they happen on the surface and the electronic structure of the materials” by combining information of the surface morphology with the electronic structure and chemistry. This, he said, will provide a “comprehensive picture of the surface, or of a catalyst, or of a reaction” as it’s occurring.

One of the first experiments he might do would be to provide a chemical map of the surface of a material. He plans to determine the oxidation state of metals making up the surface.

Sadowski lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife Adrianna Sadowska (whose name is slightly different to reflect her gender). The couple met in their native Poland where he was taking a class to brush up on Japanese before moving there after he earned his Ph.D. Sadowska, who is now a wine specialist at an auction house in White Plains, was preparing for a trip to Japan as well. The two expatriates lived in Japan for almost a decade. After getting married in Japan, they came to the United States.

As for his work, Sadowski said new questions regularly inspire him. “Every day, there’s a new challenge,” he said. “I really like to solve problems, one by one.”

The work done at Sadowski’s group and at the CFN can and likely will have numerous benefits, Osgood said.

This work could “form new technology that nobody dreamed about before,” said Osgood, who was an associate director at BNL and was directly involved in the creation of the CFN. “Every time I walk out there, I kick up my heels. It’s such a wonderful facility.”

Part 1 of a two-part series.

She is a “creative thinker,” while he is a “fearless experimentalist,” according to UCLA Distinguished Professor Sabeeha Merchant. Brookhaven National Laboratory recently hired the tandem of Crysten and Ian Blaby in the Biology Department.

Crysten and Ian Blaby did their postdoctoral work in Merchant’s lab for about five years. Merchant believes “there is no question that they will make discoveries to advance knowledge.”

The Times Beacon Record Newspapers will profile the scientific studies of the Blabys. This week’s column will highlight the work of Crysten Blaby, and next week’s will profile Ian Blaby.

Crysten Blaby is something of a metal worker, although she doesn’t dig anything out of the earth, wear a hard hat or ship metals by the ton. In fact, the amount of metal in her job is so small that the copper, iron, zinc and manganese she works with in a year wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.

That’s because Blaby (pronounced like “baby” with an extra letter) studies a one-celled algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This organism survives in a wide range of environments, where the amount of available metals can be precariously low, dangerously high, or can bounce back and forth between extremes.

Blaby, who is an assistant biologist at BNL, would like to know which proteins in these algae, among other species, including bacteria, plants and animals, are involved in maintaining a balance of metals.

“I am focused on the genes and proteins in metal homeostasis,” she said. That means she wants to know what genes are active in different environments.

Understanding the molecular biology of algae can provide clues about where to look for similar genes in more complex members of the plant kingdom. Discovering these processes could help farmers develop techniques that will foster growth for biofuel crops that are cultivated on lands that are less suited for food production.

“With this research, we could find easy, cheap ways to ‘diagnose’ whether crops are deficient in metal nutrients and best know how to remedy it,” she explained. “This research could also be used to help select which crops or breeds would thrive best given the quality of a particular soil.”

While Blaby won’t help produce new biofuel crops, her discoveries about the genes involved in metal homeostasis is part of “foundational science” that will underpin those types of discoveries, said John Shanklin, the head of plant science research at BNL. “Without [Ian and Crysten Blaby] doing this” the scientists who want to produce biofuel crops in inhospitable environments “are stuck.”

Blaby’s work could also help provide information that might translate into therapies for human conditions.

Menkes disease and Wilson’s disease are two inherited disorders of copper metabolism, which are caused by dysfunctional copper transporters, she said.

Blaby recently discovered a copper chaperone that looks similar to a molecule in humans and that’s involved in keeping algae safe from accumulations of copper. She suggested that the chaperone in algae protects the cell from copper by making sure that it is hand delivered between proteins. More research, however, is needed to ensure this model is accurate.

Blaby is studying the biochemical routes these metals take into the cell. The main gatekeepers controlling the movement of metal ions across membranes are likely transporters, she said.

Blaby is scheduled for beamline time at the new National Synchrotron Light Source II facility at BNL this April. The process of getting time on the beamline is extremely competitive, with numerous top-notch scientific projects rejected in part because the facility can’t yet meet the demand for a light source that is 10,000 times more powerful than the original synchrotron.

“People recognize [Crysten and Ian Blaby] are asking cutting-edge questions and they are trying to assist them in every way they can,” Shanklin said. “Everyone wants to be a part of [their] success.” After she moved to BNL, Blaby developed her NSLS-II application with Professor Emeritus Keith Jones, a physicist who she said is involved in experiments at the new synchrotron, and several of his collaborators.

“The goal is to uncover where metals travel in the cell after uptake and before they are loaded into target proteins, and understand which proteins, such as transporters, are involved” in this process, she said.

Blaby is collaborating with Qun Liu, another new hire at BNL, to look at transporter proteins, to understand how many different kinds there are, and “figure out how plants move nutrients around,” Shanklin said.

One of the ways she can solve how genes respond to different environments is by using small RNAs to knock down gene expression.

Ian and Crysten, who met when they worked in a lab in Florida, are residents of Miller Place. When they met, they were “instantly friends,” she said, in part because of their shared interest in science. They each appreciate having someone who “understands the challenges, disappointments and pure joy of discovery that comes with pursuing this career.”

The plant biologists have a two-year old daughter Emily.

As for their work, Crysten Blaby said they collaborate with each other but also concentrate on those areas where they have each developed their individual skills.

“We focus on the pathways for genes that are involved in processes that we have expertise in and where our passion lies,” she said.

This version corrects the department Crysten and Ian Blaby work in at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The creation of a freeway in Los Angeles put Michael Bell on the road to his career choice. When Bell was about 12 years old, construction near his home cut through rocks that contained a treasure for him: fossil fish.

“I formed a relationship with the Natural History Museum in LA County and started bringing fossils [to them],” Bell recalled. “I had friends who would do it for a week or two and then they’d had enough. I did it endlessly. In a way, that’s how my career started.”

Indeed, that career led him to Stony Brook University, where he arrived in 1978 and is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Bell was co-editor of “The Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback” in 1994 with Susan A. Foster.

Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elected Bell as a Ffellow. Bell said he appreciated the “broader recognition of his work.”

Those who have collaborated with him said Bell is a leader and an exceptional scientist.

Bell’s “contribution to the field has been enormous,” explained Windsor Aguirre, a former graduate student who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at DePaul University who still works with Bell. “Many of the most important papers in the field have been made possible or greatly enhanced [by Bell’s efforts],” he said.

From those early days, Bell has focused on the threespine stickleback, a fish that used to be considerably more prevalent at Flax Pond in Old Field and in the Great South Bay.

This particular fish, whose three sharp spines on the top of its body prevent some predators from swallowing it, appeals to scientists for a host of reasons —  from the variation it exhibits within and among populations to its relatively small size and ease of maintaining in a lab.

Bell has focused on establishing the relationship between traits and environmental factors. These fish can live in the sea ­— where they contend with the usual saltwater dilemma, where the concentration of salt is higher than in body fluids — and in freshwater, where salt is lower than in their body fluids.

Like salmon, they breed in brackish water (water that’s in between fresh and salty) and freshwater. The population of fish that evolve in freshwater can continue to survive despite having marine ancestors.

Indeed, the evolution, through mutations, of these fish is so rapid that they defy Charles Darwin. Coming up with the theory of natural selection when he studied the many unique birds in the Galapagos Islands 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin believed that evolution occurred on an almost imperceptibly slow time scale.

“Darwin underestimated the potential for rapid evolution,” Bell said. “He believed evolution is slow.” Sticklebacks have traits that evolve at high rates.

Bell has studied stickleback fossils in Nevada and California and modern stickleback in California and Alaska.

He has often studied the armor plates of stickleback, which have a marine and a freshwater version. In the ocean, the freshwater version would theoretically occur only once in about 10,000 young sticklebacks, because it’s a disadvantage to that individual. However, in a different environment, the fish with the freshwater armor plating becomes the natural selection superstar.

In an experiment in Cheney Lake in Anchorage, Alaska, Bell released sea-run stickleback. A year later, none of the fish had the freshwater plates, while fewer than 1 percent had them two years later. Six years after the experiment began, however, one in five fish had these plates.

“When you put the fish in freshwater, it evolves,” he said.

A resident of Stony Brook, Bell chose to live close enough to the university to walk to work. That, he said, was by design because he moved in during the gas crisis in the 1970s and didn’t want to wait in line for gas or struggle to get to work.

Bell and his wife Cynthia Blair travel to farms out east, shop and visit vineyards. Bell enjoys wandering through stores, especially for craft objects, which Blair also likes and makes herself. She designed a pillow of Bell, surrounded by swimming sticklebacks.

After four decades of research, Bell remains as inspired to find fossils and gather evidence about these rapidly evolving and adaptive fish as he was when he was a teenager.

“I won’t ever really retire,” said Bell, although he does expect to cut back so that he can travel with his wife. He appreciates being able to visit the shore of a lake in Alaska and “see what comes up in traps. It’s all still fun — making samples of modern and fossil stickleback, getting results that mean something scientifically and standing in front of a class and explaining biology to them.”

Aguirre, who described Bell as a “great” mentor, suggested that Bell and the stickleback are inextricably intertwined. “The threespine stickleback is truly one of evolutionary biology’s supermodels and [Bell] has played a critical role in bringing the species to the attention of the broader scientific community and the general public.”