This paper was published in a new Nature-family partner journal “NPJ Computational Materials” that is dedicated to computational modeling of materials and materials-by-design stuff. So, no impact factor for this one yet, but of course we expect it to be quite high when it becomes available. Kudos to our graduate students John and Krishna who collaborated on this project!

 

Published in “Reports on Progress in Physics” together with colleagues from Argonne National Lab. This review had been a back burner activity for awhile until we finally managed to put all the pieces together in late Spring of 2016.

 

This project was mostly done by Siliang Chang, who is the student of Prof. Christos Takoudis at UIC. Seungbum Hong and Yoon-Young Choi (ANL) provided help with PFM electrical characterization. Serge mostly provided cheerleading support, as he usually does. Congratulations to Siliang again. Here is the link to the paper entitled Atomic layer deposition of environmentally benign SnTiO_x as a potential ferroelectric material that is coming out as part of the special issue of Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology A dedicated to ALD growth.

is now out in Advanced Electronic Materials. Our group contribution was delivered by Krishna together with William Parker, plus a little help by Lukasz (who was an undergraduate student at the time) and Lydie. Here is the link to the paper:

Nanosecond Phase Transition Dynamics in Compressively Strained Epitaxial BiFeO₃

 

This paper titled “Temperature dependent structural, elastic, and polar properties of ferroelectric polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and trifluoroethylene (TrFE) copolymers” is coauthored by UConn natives only: Fu-Chang Sun, Avinash Dongare, Alex Asandei, S. Pamir Alpay and Serge Nakhmanson.

 

 

A paper by John Mangeri, Serge Nakhmanson and our collaborators Olle Heinonen (Argonne) and Dima Karpeyev (UChicago) entitled “Elastic and surface strain influence on optical properties of semiconducting core-shell nanoparticles” was recently accepted to Phys. Rev. Applied. A teaser image for this paper is shown on the right.

 

Structural, vibrational, and dielectric properties of Ruddlesden-Popper Ba₂ZrO₄ from first principles, by Lydie Louis and Serge Nakhmanson. The picture below shows a tentative sequence of Ba₂ZrO₄ epitaxial phases — determined by evaluating the behavior of low-frequency vibrational modes — depending on the changing biaxial strain ε_s.

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.

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.

Strain induced vortex-to-uniform polarization transitions in soft-ferroelectric nanoparticles by Byounghak Lee, Serge M. Nakhmanson and Olle Heinonen, Appl. Phys. Lett. 104, 262906 (2014).