Materials Sciences and Engineering Research Highlights

Dissecting the Heaviest Fermion

This research demonstrates the use of elastocaloric measurements in probing CEF splitting, and determines that the first excited CEF state is well below the Kondo temperature.

Highly tunable magnetism in a candidate topological semimetal

We discovered that the magnetism in the candidate Dirac semimetal LaMnxSb2 is extremely sensitive to the Mn occupancy, with six possible antiferromagnetic phases and two crystal structures.

Tuning Magnetic Topological Insulators using Defects

Inelastic neutron scattering experiments reveal that magnetism in stoichiometric and lightly doped magnetic topological insulators in the Sb2Te3-MnSb2Te4 family is controlled by universal interactions between magnetic defects.

Visual of Mn-Te-Mn antiferromagnetic (AFM) dimers in Mn-doped Sb2Te3

Orbital Fluctuations Control the Magnetism of a Topological Metal

Initiation of a spin-reorientation in TbMn6Sn6 by Tb orbital fluctuations revealed by inelastic neutron scattering (INS) experiments.

Tb ions in a triangular layer of TbMn6Sn6

Chlorination of 2D Silicon Revealed by NMR

Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy methods to detect chlorine atoms were developed and showed that 20% of the silicon atoms in 2D silicon nanosheets are chlorine terminated.

PEG-Grafted Silver Nanoparticles: Implications for Plasmonics and Photonics

Lamellar and hexagonal assemblies of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were formed by grafting them with thiolated polyethylene glycol (PEG). Novel two- and three-dimensional assemblies were achieved by controlling differences in core AgNP types and grafting densities.

Graphs and Illustrations of PEG40k-AgNPs

ML-guided discovery of ternary compounds involving immiscible elements

Novel low-energy La-Co-Pb ternary compounds involving a pair of immiscible Co-Pb elements are efficiently predicted by integrating machine learning (ML) with ab initio calculations.

Adaptive quantum circuit construction for ground state preparation of multiorbital impurity models

Different variational quantum eigensolvers for ground state preparation of multiorbital embedding impurity models were benchmarked in the presence of hardware noise.

eg impurity-bath model and ground state energy convergence graph

Tuning electronic coupling in bilayer graphenevis-á-vis metal intercalation

Gd intercalation introduces an exceptionally large transverse displacement field acting on the overlying Bernal - stacked bilayer graphene (BLG).

breaking interlayer coupling in graphene

Imaging exciton-plasmon polaritons in WSe2/Au heterostructures

Exciton-plasmon polaritons in WSe2/Au heterostructures are imaged, which show a strong coupling between excitons in WSe2 and surface plasmons on gold.