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Flat elastic sheets tend to display wrinkles and folds. From pieces of clothing down to two-dimensional crystals, these corrugations appear in response to strain generated by sheet compression or stretching, thermal or mechanical mismatch…
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…
We study avenues to shape multistability and shape-morphing in flexible crystalline membranes of cylindrical topology, enabled by glide mobility of dislocations. Using computational modeling, we obtain states of mechanical equilibrium…
THz-frequency optical pulses can resonantly drive selected vibrational modes in solids and deform their crystal structure. In complex oxides, this method has been used to melt electronic orders, drive insulator to metal transitions or…
Emergent magnetic states at oxide interfaces arise from the interplay of charge transfer, orbital reconstruction, and dimensional confinement, offering a route to engineered correlated-electron behavior in nanoscale spintronic materials.…
Metastable nanostructures are kinetically trapped in local energy minima featuring intriguing surface and material properties. To unleash their potential, there is a need for non-equilibrium processes capable of stabilizing a large range of…
Recent advancements in dislocation engineering are reshaping the traditional view towards ceramics being brittle. Here, we use KTaO3 (KTO), a perovskite oxide that is newly discovered with room-temperature bulk plasticity, and demonstrate…
The control of the in-plane domain evolution in ferroelectric thin films is not only critical to understanding ferroelectric phenomena but also to enabling functional device fabrication. However, in-plane polarized ferroelectric thin films…
Architected materials achieve unique mechanical properties through precisely engineered microstructures that minimize material usage. However, a key challenge of low-density materials is balancing high stiffness with stable deformability up…
In ABO3 perovskites, oxygen octahedron rotations are common structural distortions that can promote large ferroelectricity in BiFeO3 with an R3c structure [1], but suppress ferroelectricity in CaTiO3 with a Pbnm symmetry [2]. For many…
SrTiO$_3$ (STO) is the substrate of choice to grow oxide thin-films and oxide heterojunctions, which can form quasi-two-dimensional electronic phases that exhibit a wealth of phenomena, and, thus, a workhorse in the emerging field of…
Recently, it was established that a two-dimensional electron system can arise at the interface between two oxide insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3. This paradigmatic example exhibits metallic behaviour and magnetic properties between…
Using Landau-Ginzburg-Devonshire approach, we predict the intrinsic instability of the ferroelectric-ferroelastic domain walls in the multiferroic BiFeO3 emerging from the interplay between the gradient terms of the antiferrodistortive and…
The insulating state is one of the most basic electronic phases in condensed matter. This state is characterised by an energy gap for electronic excitations that makes an insulator electrically inert at low energy. However, for complex…
Thin film dynamics and associated instability mechanisms have triggered a wide range of scientific innovations, as attributed to their abilities of creating fascinating patterns over small scales. Here, we demonstrate a new thin film…
Interplay of lattice, orbital, and charge degrees of freedom in complex oxide materials has hosted a plethora of exotic quantum phases and physical properties. Recent advances in synthesis of freestanding complex oxide membranes and twisted…
Ultra-dense domain walls are increasingly important for many devices but their microscopic properties are so far not fully understood. Here we use molecular dynamic simulations to study the domain wall stability in the prototypical…
Tuning the lattice degree of freedom in nanoscale functional crystals is critical to exploit the emerging functionalities such as piezoelectricity, shape-memory effect, or piezomagnetism, which are attributed to the intrinsic lattice-polar…
Multi-stable mechanical structures find cutting-edge applications across various domains due to their reconfigurability, which offers innovative possibilities for engineering and technology advancements. This study explores the emergence of…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…