In the early 1990s, Yang, while still a graduate student in Charles Lieber's Lab at Harvard University, started to investigate flux line pinning in
high Tc superconductors using nanowires as pinning centers. The approach was to introduce single-crystalline oxide nanowires into a high-Tc superconductor, to make a composite to create stable nanoscopic linear tracks, and to increase the critical current density by "pinning" the flux lines. This oxide nanowire synthesis marked the start of both Lieber's group and global nanowire research. Yang is known for his work in semiconductor nanowire and nanostructure synthesis and characterization, having co-authored over 400 peer-reviewed journal articles, including the paper titled "Room-Temperature Ultraviolet Nanowire Nanolasers," published in
Science in 2001, which has received over 11,000 citations. Later, as one of the founders of the semiconductor nanowire research field, he was named a
Clarivate Citation Laureate in Physics in 2014. In 2005, Yang introduced for the first time a surrounding gate sub-5nm nanowire field-effect transistor architecture with excellent subthreshold behavior and gate coupling and energy efficiency. In the 1990s,
Mildred Dresselhaus predicted that tailoring the diameters, compositions, and carrier concentrations of thin nanowires could enhance thermoelectric performance by impeding phonon transport through boundary scattering and phonon confinement. Yang and his colleague
Arun Majumdar were the first to demonstrate experimentally that silicon nanowires exhibit size-dependent thermal conductivities, validating this early prediction. He later discovered that
silicon nanowires with rough surfaces and 50 nm diameters exhibit a 100-fold reduction in
thermal conductivity, achieving
zT~0.6 at room temperature, a technology later commercialized by
Alphabet Energy, which explored its potential for waste heat recovery and greenhouse gas reduction. In 2015, Yang and his team developed a synthetic biophotonic "leaf," This marked the first fully integrated system designed to produce value-added chemicals directly from CO2, H2O, and sunlight. In 2024, he revised the nanowire biophotochemical system design, enabling bias-free CO2 fixation with a high current density under red light irradiation. This new design allowed the operation of such biophotochemical diodes 24/7, eliminating the dependence on intermittent sunlight irradiation. As a co-leader of the JCAP, Yang contributed to the establishment of the JCAP energy hub and has led efforts to develop materials that use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into fuel. Yang coined the term "Liquid Sunlight" to describe a new form of chemical energy stored in chemical bonds derived from solar energy, a concept now used in national research initiatives in Europe and Asia, as well as the DOE energy hub, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA).
Business ventures Yang co-founded Alphabet Energy with
Matthew L. Scullin and was also a founding member of the scientific advisory board at
Nanosys, a nanomaterials company whose nanowire technologies were acquired by OneD Battery Sciences in 2013. OneD Materials manufactures silicon nanowires at scale for battery makers, utilizing a scaled-up CVD system to produce nanowire-based composites with 340 MWh anode capacity. Since 1999, Yang has been the inventor of several fundamental nanowire IPs covering a range of nanowire structures for energy applications, including US Patent No. 9,881,999, US 7,569,941, US 7,569,847, US 6,996,147, US 6,882,051, US 5,897,945, and US 7,834,264. ==Awards and honors==