Paper on electron lone-pair behavior in perovskites published in Phys Rev B

First-principles studies of lone-pair-induced distortions in epitaxial phases of perovskite SnTiO3 and PbTiO3 by Krishna Pitike, William Parker, Lydie Louis, and Serge Nakhmanson. This is the first paper that was produced together with the members of my new UConn group. The picture below shows the lone pair charge density distribution in SnTiO3 and PbTiO3 with polarization pointing along different crystallographic directions, or with no polarization in the rightmost column.

Figure5

Interview with Serge published on Ohio University College of Arts & Sciences Forum site

This is an interview that we have been working on for some time together with Jean Andrews after my colloquium visit to Ohio University (OU) in March of 2014. It is really great that OU is organizing that sort of alumni activity; I especially appreciated an opportunity to mingle with graduate students and show them what, in principle, could be done with a PhD degree from OU Physics. Plus, naturally, being interviewed gave me a platform to reminisce about the good old days, when pressures of making tenure, raising external funding and getting into high-impact journals were non-existent.

Anyway, here is the link: Physics Alum Is a Digital Alchemist Transforming Matter.

Paper on in situ MBE growth of layered oxides is out in Nature Materials

Dynamic layer rearrangement during growth of layered oxide films by molecular beam epitaxy by J. H. Lee, G. Luo, I. C. Tung, S. H. Chang, Z. Luo, M. Malshe, M. Gadre, A. Bhattacharya, S. M. Nakhmanson, J. A. Eastman, H. Hong, J. Jellinek, D. Morgan, D. D. Fong, and J. W. Freeland, Nature Materials, doi:10.1038/nmat4039 (2014).

There is also an accompanying article at the UConn MSE department site.

Serge Nakhmanson visits his Alma Mater to deliver a colloquium presentation

Serge — the self-described “digital alchemist” and an Ohio University alum (Ph.D. in Physics in 2001) — presented the Physics & Astronomy Colloquium on Computational Design of Multifunctional Complex-oxide Materials Across Length Scales on Friday, March 21, 2014, during a two day visit to his Alma Mater hosted by Serge’s Ph.D. advisor Prof. David Drabold.

David Drabold (left) and Serge at Clippinger Labs, circa March 2014. David is doing the introductions before the beginning of the colloquium.
(Photographer: Jean Andrews, Ohio University)