Materials Science
We report the discovery of a novel ternary nitride PrTaN$_2$ synthesized as a thin film using molecular beam epitaxy. The combination of e-beam evaporation for refractory elements and a radio-frequency nitrogen radical source enables growth…
Targeted phonon excitation offers a route to dynamically control heat conduction, yet no general principle predicts whether a spectrally selective nonequilibrium phonon population will enhance or suppress thermal transport. A…
A novel approach to post mortem characterisation of electrochemical and photovoltaic devices is spatially-resolved diffraction using a hyper-focused, micron-width x-ray beam to examine the distribution of degradation products and strain, a…
High-Energy Diffraction Microscopy (HEDM) recovers crystallographic orientation, strain, and grain position from rotating-crystal X-ray diffraction patterns. Existing forward models in far-field (FF), near-field (NF), and point-focused (pf)…
We present a multiscale first-principles-to-machine-learning approach to investigate ultrafast lattice dynamics in electronically excited $\alpha$-SiO$_2$. Ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) based on electronic-temperature-dependent…
Permanent magnets with strong anisotropy and high coercivity underpin modern information and energy technologies, yet rare-earth-free alternatives remain limited. Here, we show that thickness engineering via mechanical exfoliation induces…
Open-shell molecules are highly sensitive probes of correlated oxide surfaces because their partially occupied frontier orbitals strongly amplify subtle changes in adsorbate-substrate hybridization. Combining infrared reflection-absorption…
Vanadium Dioxide (VO2) and Vanadium Sesquioxide (V2O3) are Mott insulators that undergo an Insulator-to-Metal Transition (IMT) at ~340K and ~160K, respectively, manifested as an orders-of-magnitude reduction in their electrical resistance.…
Two-step thermochemical water splitting driven by concentrated solar heat is a scalable route to renewable hydrogen, but it requires oxides whose oxygen-vacancy formation energies balance facile reduction with favorable reoxidation.…
Cavity materials engineering, aiming to manipulate material properties by coupling to vacuum fluctuations inside a cavity, is a rapidly advancing field. Despite significant progress, most studies to date have focused on specific materials…
The ideal quantum geometry (IQG) condition of equal magnitude between quantum metric ($G(k)$) and Berry curvature ($\Omega(k)$) as in $|\Omega|$/Tr$G$=1 has been associated with realizing fractional Chern insulators for the flat band in few…
The ability to precisely control magnetic properties is central to the development of future spin-based electronics. In this work, we report the successful growth of epitaxial {\alpha}-MnTe thin films on InP(111) substrates using molecular…
Hydration and dehydration are powerful yet underexplored variables for controlling the architecture of layered inorganic materials, because intercalated water can modify interlayer separation, hydrogen-bonding networks, and layer stacking.…
Condensed matter physics is replete with phenomena involving high-energy free particles coalescing into low-energy bound few-particle states. While the cooling of the individual particles is well understood, the crucial step by which cold…
Bi is predicted to be an efficient generator of spin-orbit torques (SOTs), with charge-to-spin conversion efficiency comparable to those of prototypical heavy metals, such as Ta, W, and Pt. However, experimental reports provide widely…
Anomalous magneto-transport responses provide complementary probes of orbital motion, momentum-space topology, and real-space spin chirality, yet their integration into a single material remains rare because their underlying requirements…
The high-temperature performance of ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs) in atmospheric environment is fundamentally governed by their melting points of oxidation products. Typical high-melting-point oxides, such as ZrO2, undergo phase…
We report neutron powder diffraction measurements and path-integral molecular dynamics simulations of stacking-disorder-free cubic ice I$_c$, produced by topotactic degassing of C2 hydrogen hydrate. Across the cryogenic stability range, ice…
Perovskite oxides have emerged as an important class of material with promising energy applications owing to their compositional and structural flexibility, which enables stabilization of both low- and high-symmetry phases and gives rise to…
Accurate atomistic modelling of iron (Fe) oxidation requires a reliable interatomic potential, which necessitates an extensive and representative first-principles dataset for training the interatomic potential. However, Fe-oxygen (O) system…