John V. Badding

John V. Badding

Main Content

  • Professor of Chemistry, Physics and Materials Science and Engineering
  • Director of Graduate Recruiting
120 Chemistry Building
University Park, PA 16802
(814) 777-3054


  1. B.S., Manhattan College, 1984
  2. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1989
  3. Postdoctoral Fellow, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution

Honors and Awards:

  1. Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship
  2. David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellow
  3. NSF National Young Investigator
  4. 2015 Faculty Scholar Medal

Selected Publications:

Liu, Y.; Kempinger, S.; He, R.; Day, T.; Moradifar, P.; Yu, S.; Russell, J.; Torres, V.; Xu, P.; Mallouk , T. E. ; Mohney, S.; Alem, N.; Samarth, N.; Badding, J., Confined Chemical Fluid Deposition of Ferromagnetic Metalattices, Nano Letters, DOI:10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b04633.

Li, X., Baldini, M., Wang, T., Chen, B., Xu, E.-S., Vermilyea, B., Crespi, V., Hoffmann, R., Molaison, J., Tulk, C., Guthrie, M., Sinogeikin, S., Badding, J.V., Mechanochemical Synthesis of Carbon Nanothread Single Crystals, JACS, 139, 16343-16349 (2017).

Ji, X. Y., Poilvert, N., Liu, W. J., Xiong, Y. H., Cheng, H. Y., Badding, J. V., Dabo, I. and Gopalan, V., A silicon microwire under a three-dimensional anisotropic tensile stress, Applied Physics Letters, 110,091911 (2017).

Ji, X., Lei, S. Yu, S.-Y., Cheng, H-Y, Liu, W., Poilvert, N. Xiong, Y., Dabo, I., Mohney, S., Badding, J., Gopalan, V. Single-Crystal Silicon Optical Fiber by Direct Laser Crystallization, ACS Photonics, 4, 85–92 (2017).

Ji, X., Page, R., Chaudhuri, S., Liu, W., Yu, S.-Y., Mohney, S.E., Badding, J.V., Gopalan, V., Single Crystal Germanium Core Optoelectronic Fibers Advanced Optical Materials, 5, 1600592 (2017).

Zhang, H-T., Guo, L., Stone, G.,Zhang, L., Zheng, H-T., Freeman, E., Keefer, D.W., Chaudhuri, S., Paik, H., Moyer, J.A., Barth, M., Schlom, D.G., Badding, J.V., Datta, S., Gopalan, V., and Engel-Herbert, R., Imprinting of Local Metallic States into VO2 with Ultraviolet Light, Advanced Functional Materials, in press.

He, R., Day, T.D., Sparks, J.R., Sullivan, N.F., and Badding, J. V., High Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition of Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon Films and Solar Cells, Advanced Materials, DOI:10.1002/adma.201600415.

Chen, B., Hoffmann, R., Ashcroft, N.W., Badding, J.V., Xu, E., Crespi, V., Linearly polymerized benzene arrays as intermediates, tracing pathways to carbon nanothreads, JACS, 137, 14373-14386 (2015).

Tao, G., Ebendorff-Heidepriem, H., Stolyarov, A. M., Danto, S., Badding, J.V., Fink, Y., Ballato, J. and Abouraddy, A.F., Infrared fibers, Advances in Optics and Photonics, 7, 379-458 (2015).

Fitzgibbons, T.C., Guthrie, M., Xu, E., Crespi, V.H, Davidowski, S.K., Cody, G.D., Alem, N. and Badding, J.V., Benzene-derived carbon nanothreads, Nature Materials, 14, 43-47 (2015).

Zhao, W., Bischof, J., Hutasoit, J, Liu, X., Fitzgibbons, T., Hayes, J., Sazio, P., Liu, C., Jain, J., Badding, J., Chan, M. Single-Fluxon Controlled Resistance Switching in Centimeter-Long Superconducting Gallium-Indium Eutectic Nanowires, Nano Letters, 15, 153-158 (2015).

Healy, N., Mailis, S., Bulgakova, N., Sazio, P.J.A., Day, T.D., Sparks, J.R., Chen, H.Y., Badding, J. V. and Peacock, A. C.,, Extreme electronic bandgap modification in laser-crystallized ​silicon optical fibres, Nature Materials, 13, 1122–1127 (2014).

Sparks, J.R., Sazio, P.J.A., Gopalan, V., Badding, J. V., Templated Chemically Deposited Semiconductor Optical Fiber Materials, Annual Review of Materials Research, 43, 527-557 (2013).

Liu, X., Tang, Y., Xu, E., Fitzgibbons, T., Larsen, G., Gutierrez, H., Tseng, H.-H., Yu, M.-S., Tsao, C.-S., Badding, J., Crespi, V., Lueking, A., Evidence for Ambient-Temperature Reversible Catalytic Hydrogenation in Pt-doped Carbon, Nano Letters, 13, 137–141 (2013).

He, R., Day, T.D., Krishnamurthi, M., Sparks, J.R., Sazio, P.J.A., Gopalan, V., and Badding, J. V., Silicon p-i-n Junction Fibers, Advanced Materials, 25, 1461-1467 (2013).

Sparks, J.R., He, R., Healy, N., Chaudhuri, S., Peacock, A.C., Sazio, P.J.A., and Badding, J. V., Conformal Coating by High Pressure Chemical Deposition for Patterned Microwires of II-VI Semiconductors, Advanced Functional Materials, 23, 1647-1654 (2013).

He, R.,Sazio, P.J.A., Peacock, A.C, Healy, N., Sparks, J.R., Krishnamurthi, M., Gopalan, V., and Badding, J. V., Integration of GHz Bandwidth Semiconductor Devices inside Microstructured Optical Fibres, Nature Photonics, 6, 174-179 (2012).

Baril, N.F., He, R., Day, T.D., Sparks, J.R., Keshavarzi, B., , Krishnamurthi, M., Borhan, A., Gopalan, V., Peacock, A.C, Healy, N., Sazio, P.J.A., and Badding, J. V. Confined High-Pressure Chemical Deposition of Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 134, 19-22 (2012).

Sparks, J.R., He, R., Healy, N., Krishnamurthi, M, Peacock, A.M., Sazio, P.J.A., Gopalan, V. Badding, J.V. Zinc Selenide Optical Fibers,Advanced Materials, 23, 1647 (2011).



Solid state and materials chemistry; synthesis of new materials; supercritical fluids; pressure tuning of materials; optoelectronic films and metamaterials; nanoscale reactions; thermoelectric materials.

Materials Chemistry

The Badding group focuses on several areas of inorganic and polymeric materials chemistry, including optoelectronic materials and metamaterials, carbon nanomaterials, thermoelectric materials, chemical and physical phenomena in microscale and nanoscale capillaries and orifices, biomedical materials, and polymer nanofibers. A theme running through much of our research is the exploitation of high pressures, which can allow for new phenomena and very useful capabilities not otherwise possible at ambient pressure. High pressure supercritical fluids, for example, can combine the physical transport properties of a gas with the solvating ability and density of a liquid. As a result there is increasing interest in high pressure fluids across a variety of industries and in new technological areas. Chemical and physical behavior at high pressures can be very different in part because mean free paths are up to several orders of magnitude smaller at high pressure (often on the order of 1 nm or less vs 100 nm or more at lower pressures). At the micro and nano scales, the use of high pressures becomes increasingly practical because pressure is force per unit area and the forces involved become very small as the area decreases. The geometric confinement imposed by working in micro/nanoscale spaces also leads to different and in some cases very surprising and nonintuitive behavior. We strive to focus on basic problems that have the potential to have a major technological impact over time and/or open new areas of scientific research. This work may lead to tunable mid-infrared fiber-based lasers of unprecedented optical power, for example.  p-i-n junction "solar threads" have been demonstrated as a first step toward a variety of fiber based electronic devices that may allow for detection or generation of light.  The possibility of solar fabrics based on these materials has attracted much attention. Extreme strain tuning of the band gap of silicon constrained within a fiber template has been demonstrated.

We have pioneered the high pressure deposition of micro and nanowires of a broad range of materials in extreme aspect pores. In 2006 we used this approach to demonstrate the first silicon and germanium core optical fibers, thus extending the range of materials that can be exploited in the fiber geometry to unary semiconductors. The geometric perfection of these atomically smooth structures exceeds considerably what is typically possible with planar fabrication methods. Following this work, single crystal silicon wires, and, recently the first crystalline compound semiconductor fiber cores have been demonstrated. The nano/microstructured optical fiber templates we use can be designed to have arbitrary configurations of periodic or aperiodic pores with dimensions from tens of microns less than thirty nanometers. They thus allow for hierarchical organization of materials across many length scales down to nanoscale dimensions, as complex structures can be fabricated within each pore.

Another longstanding interest is the synthesis of novel carbon nanomaterials using high pressure techniques. We have recently discovered that sp3-bonded carbon nanothreads can be synthesized by chemical reaction between benzene molecules ordered in the solid state. These diamondoid nanothreads (colloquially "diamond" nanothreads) have tetrahedrally bonded carbon and sub-nm diameters.  They promise extraordinary properties such as strength and stiffness higher than that of sp2 carbon nanotubes or conventional high-strength polymers. They may be the first member of a new class of ordered sp3 nanomaterials synthesized by kinetic control of high-pressure solid-state reactions.

Research Interests:


Materials chemistry, high pressure chemistry

Materials and Nanoscience

Photonic materials, carbon nanomaterials, nanostructured materials, thermoelectric materials, energy materials, solar cell materials and structures


Reaction thermodynamics and kinetics, raman spectroscopy, spectroscopy of solid state materials, light scattering


Graduate Program