Robert Jacobberger, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has earned a 2025 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award.
The highly competitive DARPA Young Faculty Award program provides funding, mentoring, and industry and national security contacts to researchers in junior faculty positions at academic and non-profit research institutions across the United States. The goal is to develop the next generation of academic scientists, engineers and mathematicians whose long-term research focus has the potential to address national security needs.
Jacobberger, a PhD alumnus of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering who joined the faculty of the College of Engineering in 2022, was selected for a proposal to produce large, thin films of diamond with unprecedented crystalline quality. Jacobberger aims to leverage diamond’s exceptional electronic, thermal and mechanical properties to enable next-generation electronic and quantum technologies.
While its optical properties and hardness make diamond ideal for jewelry and industrial drilling, it also turns out diamond is an ideal semiconductor for high-speed, high-power electronics applications, including next-generation electric vehicles, renewable energy conversion, and radar. That’s because diamond combines highly efficient charge and heat transport with an ultrawide electronic bandgap. And because of diamond’s toughness, it can survive conditions where silicon fails, including the high radiation, temperature, pressure and chemical environments found in space, nuclear reactors and the battlefield.
Diamond can also host atomic-scale defects that enable single electrons and photons to be trapped and manipulated. These quantum bits, or qubits, can efficiently store and process quantum information while remaining stable even at room temperature—something most quantum systems cannot achieve. That makes diamond an incredibly sensitive sensor for biological imaging, navigation and subsurface exploration.
However, to be used in these applications, diamond needs to be synthesized as a thin film just a few hundred nanometers thick, thinner than the diameter or a red blood cell. Current techniques for creating these films are costly and result in very small areas of film with many defects. It’s also not currently possible to synthesize diamond film on top of another material, limiting its use in heterostructures, or combinations of thin-film materials that produce advanced electronic devices.
In his project, Jacobberger plans to develop a commercially viable approach for producing device-quality, wafer-scale diamond films, even on non-diamond surfaces.
To do this, he will use a novel seeding technique being developed in his lab to template the diamond film growth. Using state-of-the-art diamond reactors at Argonne National Laboratory, his team will grow the films using a technique called microwave-plasma chemical vapor deposition.
Ultimately, Jacobberger and his team hope to demonstrate that their new synthesis approach yields diamond films with an unprecedented combination of high crystallinity, low defect density, large area, and exceptional properties, a major step towards realizing high-performance diamond-based electronic and quantum technologies.
. . .
Originally published: October 13, 2025
Source: College of Engineering News
Author: Jason Daley
This article was first published on the College of Engineering news page and is reposted here with permission.