Krishna Pitike, John Mangeri and Serge Nakhmanson presented their research projects at the APS March meeting in San Antonio. Serge’s presentation slides on layered oxides with new functionalities are available here (courtesy of the APS).
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.
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.
Paper on vortex-like states in soft-ferroelectric nanoparticles published in APL
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).
Serge Nakhmanson presents a talk at the Czech-Polish seminar on phase transitions
Serge Nakhmanson presented an invited talk entitled Computational design of multifunctional layered-oxide materials across length scales at the XXI Czech-Polish seminar on structural and ferroelectric phase transitions in Sezimovo Usti, Chech Republic, that was held on May 19-23, 2014.
(Photographer: Jan Kroupa)
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.
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| 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) | |
Congratulations to Krishna Pitike
for passing the Ph.D. qualifying exam. Not yet official news, but completely unlikely to change. Well done, Krishna!
Paper on polymer piezoelectric energy harvesters published in APL
Polymer piezoelectric energy harvesters for low wind speed by Dong Jun Li, Seungbum Hong, Shiyuan Gu, YoonYoung Choi, Serge Nakhmanson, Olle Heinonen, Dmitry Karpeev and Kwangsoo No, Appl. Phys. Lett. 104, 012902 (2014).
New additions to the “Useful Stuff” page on the web site
Two additions to an initially empty “Useful Stuff” page on the web site. These include the newly launched collection of science related quotes and a link to the slides of an excellent “Polarity compensation mechanisms” tutorial that was given by Prof. Claudine Noguera in August of 2013 during the IMRC conference in Cancun, Mexico.