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Intellectual Merit: No ceramic crystal is perfect, and structural imperfections including point defects are responsible for many technologically desirable properties of ceramics. Applications such as modern computer memories rely on controlling defects inside a crystal by exposing them to large electric fields. High field effects on defective crystals, however, remain challenging to control and address.

Solid-state electronics and advanced computation has spurred significant interest in artificial intelligence and neuromorphic (i.e., brain-like) computing. However, the deterministic correlations between input and action in conventional silicon microelectronics are not well-matched to information processing in biological systems.

Heterojunctions containing two-dimensional materials can give rise to unique effects at the interface or enhance existing optical properties of the composite layers. Using organic molecules in these heterojunctions has the advantage to enable synthetically tunable electronic and optical properties.

High-throughput density functional theory (DFT) calculations are used to accelerate the discovery of new oxychalcogenide compounds. In particular, experimentally-known crystal structures are decorated with essentially all possible combinations of elements in the periodic table, generating thousands of potential compounds.

A route has been formulated that leverages heteroleptic building units to lift inversion symmetry in heteroanionic materials from balancing short-range and long-range interactions favoring octahedral tilting in perovskite-derived structures. The resulting increase in the number of noncentrosymmetric (NCS) materials is important for improving the performance of compounds found in actuator, imaging, and data storage technologies.

The Princeton MRSEC has leveraged the low disorder and long coherence of states in a pristine silicon crystal to experimentally realize the Tavis-Cummings model, a fundamental model in quantum optics. The team had previously shown that the quantum state of the magnetic moment (spin) of electrons bound to impurities in silicon can be stored for several seconds.

The DNA double helix is a universally familiar pairing of two polymer chains in water, joined into a duplex by the selective binding of side group bases, the sequence of which contains and transmits genetic information.

Simple bent molecules like CB7CB perform some seemingly miraculous tricks when packed together to make a liquid. Because the molecular ends and middles attract each other, the molecules spontaneously knit themselves together into double stranded chains many units long, like the twisted rope in the graphic. Understanding such self-assembly is key to  creating new applications for soft materials like liquid crystals and polymers.

The CEM Internal Advisory Council, a grassroots committee of students and postdoctoral researchers, created POEM to inform the Center’s direction and improve the educational and research experiences of CEM students. 

Experimental evidence in MBE-grown FeGe thin films for “chiral bobbers”, topological spin texture that exist near an interface. Theoretical modeling  predicts stable chiral bobbers in materials with both bulk and interfacial DMI. Lorentz TEM imaging of skyrmions in FeGe thinned crystals Topological Hall effect measurements of skyrmions in FeGe thin films and novel oxide heterostructures of SrIrO3/SrRuO3. Development of microwave absorption spectroscopy to probe skyrmion materials.