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SUMMARY:IMX Seminar Series - Understanding Mechanisms for Creating Complex
  Materials with Built-In Cross-Coupled Responses
DTSTART:20240506T131500
DTEND:20240506T141500
DTSTAMP:20260924T093913Z
UID:51278ca28076a848f8aa1760b6d22dd0022b4cce56b99e2b391c8c38
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Nicole A. Benedek\, Cornell University\, Ithaca USA\nThe
  properties of complex materials – those having many competing degrees o
 f freedom – are highly controllable with external ‘handles’\, such a
 s epitaxial strain\, pressure and chemical substitution\, because their gr
 ound states can be tuned to the vicinity of phase boundaries. For example\
 , the electrical resistance of some perovskite manganites (a classic famil
 y of complex materials that can be readily tuned with chemical substitutio
 n) becomes very sensitive to magnetic fields at phase boundaries\, where c
 ompeting electronic\, spin\, orbital and structural orders give rise to co
 lossal magnetoresistance. In contrast with conventional materials\, which 
 generally exhibit small changes in their properties that are difficult to 
 tune\, the properties of complex materials are controlled not just by the 
 crystal topology generally\, they also depend sensitively on geometry and 
 small structural distortions. Controlling these individual distortions to 
 produce collective functional responses has proven a remarkably successful
  materials design strategy.\nIn this talk\, I will discuss progress (by my
  own group and others) in the discovery and understanding of complex mater
 ials in which the lattice\, spin\, and orbital degrees of freedom are coup
 led and controllable with either electric fields or light. I will first fo
 cus on a particular class of materials that undergo inversion symmetry-bre
 aking transitions through a so-called ‘trilinear coupling’ mechanism\,
  in which a combination of different structural distortions – which were
  long thought to compete with and suppress each other – cooperate to giv
 e rise to a polar structure. I will then describe how we are leveraging th
 e insights gained from this work to understand and predict how ultrafast o
 ptical pulses can be used to dynamically stabilize the properties of compl
 ex materials by selective excitation of particular phonon modes. Our work 
 demonstrates how elucidating the interplay between the lattice structure a
 nd chemical composition of a material can form the foundation for progress
  across several areas of condensed matter science.\n\nBio: Nicole Benedek 
 is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engin
 eering at Cornell University\, where she leads the Theory and Simulation o
 f Materials Group. She obtained both her undergraduate and PhD degrees (Ch
 emistry and Applied Physics) from RMIT University in Melbourne\, Australia
 \, followed by postdoctoral work at Imperial College London and Cornell’
 s School of Applied and Engineering Physics. Her group uses a combination 
 of theoretical and computational techniques\, symmetry principles and simp
 le crystal chemical models to understand and predict new functionality in 
 complex materials.
LOCATION:MXF 1 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==MXF%201
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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