IMX Seminar Series - Emergent metastable states and their applications for memory devices in transition metal dichalcogenides

Non-equilibrium states in condensed matter, and particularly metastable states discovered a decade ago (Science, 344,177 (2014)) have become of great interest in recent years because of their wide fundamental relevance in different areas of physics as well as possible new applications. Various time-resolved techniques in combination with non-equilibrium scanning tunnelling microscopy has enabled us to investigate mesoscopic spatio-temporal dynamics of charge fractionalization, electron jamming and topologically arrested reveal the unusual charge ordering kinetics in the prototypical transition metal chalcogenide 1T TaS2 in great detail, revealing very interesting fundamental new physics.
The metal-insulator transition which accompanies the metastable state switching is shown to be useful for low-temperature memristor devices. Extensive characterisation of such devices shows that they stand apart by orders of magnitude in relation to other state of the art memory devices in terms of both speed and energy efficiency. The prospects for the use of such devices in superconducting cry-computing applications is demonstrated by functional hybrid devices.

Bio: Dragan Mihailovic did his undergraduate degree in Physics and PhD at Oxford, UK. Currently he is head of Department of Complex Matter at the Jozef Stefan Institute and Director of CENN Nanocenter. His primary interest is in fundamental problems in condensed matter physics, both experimental and theoretical, and his work has been largely driven by curiosity. His major achievements include: the first systematic measurements of ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy in cuprate superconductors, the experimental discovery of polar metals, the discovery of high-temperature fullerene ferromagnets with record Curie temperature and the discovery of the mechanism responsible for fullerene ferromagnetism. Together with Kabanov he proposed a polaronic mechanism of Jahn-Teller pairing and percolative superconductivity. He was the first to report a time-resolved study of fullerenes, performed the first studies of CDW transitions in 1D and 2D, the first observation of collective mode dynamics through a symmetry breaking transition. He proposed experiments, and (co)discovered a polaronic quantum spin liquid, performed the first demonstration of Grover’s algorithm with collective CDW excitations and reported the discovery of a hidden quantum state in a transition metal dichalcogenide, which he is now investigating as promising cryocomputing memory devices. His team reported the first nonequilibrium topological transition, and most recently the discovery of quantum jamming and recently, simulations of domain melting on a quantum computer.