Edgars Butanovs is an early career scientist, who defended his Doctoral thesis in 2020 and works at the ISSP UL since he was just a second year student of Bachelor studies. In 2021, he has received Ludvigs and Maris Jansons name award in Physics of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (LAS). On a daily basis, Edgars Butanovs studies nanowires – structures with diameters ten thousand times smaller than hair.
On April 23, Latvian Television reported that Edgars’ interest in physics and various technologies started at school. The choice of studies was in favor of physics, as it is a broad enough science with a wide variety of applications. Currently the young scientist works on the fabrication of nanowire photodetectors – nanowires that are covered with a few nanometers thick coating to change their photoelectric properties. Such devices are very thin and can be applied to flexible surfaces such as films. In the future, such devices could be widely used in the form of monitorable labels, as well as in combination with various other devices. Photodetectors can also be used to control street lighting.
In the TV story, Edgars Butanovs admits that the work is very interesting, not uniform - it includes literature analysis, laboratory work and data processing, as well as discussions with colleagues and presentations at conferences. He believes that in the future a wide range of applications for nanowires will be discovered.
