MRS Bulletin Materials News Podcast

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Lane Martin from Rice University about characterization of relaxor ferroelectrics, materials with noteworthy energy-conversion properties used in sensors and actuators. Martin’s research team investigated the material’s behavior at the nanoscale. The researchers found that the specific thin film they studied—the alloy lead magnesium ni...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Beth Dickey from Carnegie Mellon University about her new approach to inducing ferroelectricity into a material. Dickey’s research group worked with a class of materials known as wurtzites. The researchers specifically studied aluminum nitride and zinc oxide, which are not ferroelectric in their pristine form at room temperature. Howev...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Harry Atwater from the California Institute of Technology about his study on lightsail propulsion in order to understand how the device can be developed to do fly-by space travel riding a beam of laser light. Atwater’s research group made a square prototype device where the researchers incorporated springs at each corner, etched out of...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Ashwin Shahani and Alan Taub from the University of Michigan about their group’s simulations and experimental work detailing the formation mechanisms, morphologies, and microstructures of an in situ Al/TiC metal matrix nanocomposites processed via salt flux reaction. Using these insights, the microstructure of a material can be tuned in...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Xingchen Ye of Indiana University about his research group’s studies on the fundamental behavior of colloidal materials. Colloidal materials consist of liquids with nanoparticles suspended in them. Ye’s team is interested in how a colloidal material’s properties change as the team spatially rearranges the nanoparticles in the liquid. T...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin ’s Laura Leay interviews Fabian Meder from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova and the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Piza, Italy about his research group’s device that makes use of wind-driven plant leaf motion to generate electricity which can power a chemical delivery system. Their triboelectric nanogenerator involves an artificial leaf m...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Bowen Deng, a graduate student in Gerbrand Ceder’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, about their work on increasing the accuracy of artificial intelligence/machine learning materials prediction models. The use of computer simulations to predict the interaction between atoms in a given molecule is being replaced by machin...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin ’s Laura Leay interviews David Cahen from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, about the impact surface defects have on bulk properties, specifically in the case of lead halide perovskites. In a perspective he co-authored, Cahen connected numerous experimental data from other researchers that exposed this phenomenon. By understanding how surface defects...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Gwangmin Bae of Korea University about his work with colleagues on the design of a new smart window system that utilizes compression. Like other smart windows, this window makes use of pores within the material to adjust its transparency. However, instead of using a stretchy material that controls light scattering through the pores, Ba...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Leif Asp of Chalmers University of Technology about his group’s development of an all-carbon fiber-based structural battery. The negative electrode uses carbon fiber and, for the positive electrode, the carbon fiber is coated with lithium iron phosphate. In both cases the carbon fiber takes on the roles of mechanical reinforcement and c...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Nancy Sottos, the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign (UIUC), and Justine Paul, a former student at UIUC who now holds a position at DuPont, about their work with frontal polymerization. By mimicking patterns in biological m...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Reza Moini of Princeton University about his group’s development of an enhanced additive manufacturing technique to fabricate cementitious materials with excellent fracture toughness. They based their design of the material on the double-helical or double-bouligand structure of coelacanth fish scales that resist deformation. In order to...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews postdoctoral research fellow Rohit Pratyush Behera and Prof. Hortense Le Ferrand of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore about their design of a strong and tough ceramic that absorbs energy, inspired from biology. They borrowed microscopic designs found in a mollusk, a mantis shrimp, and the enamel casing surrounding human tee...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Yen-Hung Lin of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology about his work to eliminate defects in perovskite solar cells. Lin’s group treated the perovskites with a category of molecules known as amino-silanes, which bind vacancies in the perovskites, preventing recombination of the electrons and holes. The amino-silane treatment r...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Michael Pettes, deputy group leader and staff scientist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies in Los Alamos National laboratory about a characterization technique that employs a four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscope (4D-STEM) paired with complex computational data analysis to directly measure the thermal exp...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Michael Dickey of North Carolina State University about the discovery and mechanical properties of glassy gels. Dicky credits his postdoc Meixiang Wang who, while studying ionic liquids, created the first glassy gel. Dicky’s group found that the mechanical properties of their glassy gel include shape memory, self-healing, and adhesion....

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Coskun Kocabas from The University of Manchester in the UK about his development of a metamaterial that can tailor thermal emission. Rather than using a periodic system, which most topological materials employ, his research team borrowed a concept from laser design and created an optical cavity using a dielectric medium sandwiched betwe...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Rasmus Neilsen from the Technical University of Denmark about his fabrication of a monolithic selenium/silicon tandem solar cell. The selenium forms the top cell of the tandem device, with silicon used as the bottom cell. Selenium-based single-junction solar cells have traditionally used fluorine-doped tin oxide. In this work indium-tin...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Mihir Pendharkar of Stanford University about characterizing electronic properties of twistronics materials. Twistronics refers to a type of electronic device consisting of two-dimensional materials layered at a relative twist angle, forming a new periodic structure known as moiré superlattices. Pendharkar and colleagues studied differ...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Falon Kalutantirige from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign and Ying Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison about their approach and discovery when characterizing nanovoids in polymer films. Using polyamide (PA) membranes as their subject of study, the researchers applied graph theory combined with electron tomography and...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Alexandre Dmitriev from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden about his group’s computational model of a three-dimensional metamaterial exhibiting a magnetoelectric effect—known as the Tellegen effect—when exposed to light. The building blocks of the metamaterial are comprised of disks of silicon, 150 nm in diameter, supporting a cylinde...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Antonio Dominguez-Alfaro from the University of Cambridge, UK about the development of a single-step manufacturing approach for a multimaterial 3D-printing method. The research team created two inks. One ink is a polymeric deep eutectic solvent – polyDES – made by combining and heating two salts to form a deep eutectic monomer and addin...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Elizabeth Wilson interviews postdoctoral researcher M. Iqbal Bakti Utama of Northwestern University about a method allowing single photon production without defect. Aryl diazonium chemistry has been used in the past to functionalize the surface of carbon nanotubes. Utama’s group found that this chemistry also works for tungsten diselenide surfaces. The group...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Irmgard Bischofberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about her investigation of how chirality emerges in nature. She uses liquid crystal molecules of disodium chromoglycate in her studies. When the molecules are dissolved in water, they form linear rods. The research group then forces the rods through a microfluidic cell,...

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Eric Pop, Xiangjin Wu, and Asir Intisar Khan from Stanford University about their work building a phase-change memory superlattice at the nanoscale. They created the superlattice by alternating layers of antimony-tellurium nanoclusters with a nanocomposite made from germanium, antimony, and tellurium (GST467). Each layer is ~2 nm thick...