RESEARCH INTERESTS
1. Spintronics, surfaces and interfaces
1) interfaces of spintronics, surface reconstruction, spinterface
2) atomic scale magnetic storage
3) Rashba ferroelectrics, spin-orbitronics, topological electronics
2. Design multifunctional quantum materials
1) low-dimensional materials relates to topology, energy and information, and catalysis
2) binary materials: ferroelectrics and topological materials
3) 2D materials, Materials growth on surfaces
4) tuning the properties by various methods
Technique Details:
1) state-of-the-art density functional theory in combination with tight-binding, model calculations, Monte Carlo and evolutionary algorithm, etc.
2) high throughput calculations
*Molecular spintronics: http://www.nature.com/nmat/focus/molecular-spintronics/index.html
Molecular spintronics, aiming at reaching the ultimate limits of electronic circuit miniaturization, has been driven by their mechanical flexibility and their large-scale, low-cost production compared with their inorganic counterparts. The longer spin lifetimes of organic materials compared to inorganics propelled this research field.
*The interface is the device: https://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v16/n5/full/nmat4902.html
The interface between organic and inorganic materials can behave as a spinactive layer that can dominate spin-transport properties of organic spintronic devices, leading to the concept of the spinterface. The interface between organic and inorganic materials is a versatile playground to study emerging spin properties arising from molecular absorption and hybridization on substrates, charge transfer and even chemical reactions.
*The broader concept of quantum materials: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v12/n2/full/nphys3668.html
Emergent phenomena are common in condensed matter. It has become clear that the study of emergent properties is no longer restricted to strongly correlated electron systems. For example, graphene, a system made up of sp2 electrons — hardly the definition of a strongly correlated material — with the observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Graphene displays the hallmarks of topological order, which include dissipationless transport and emergent particles with fractional charge and statistics.
Quantum materials provide a common thread linking disparate communities of researchers working on a variety of problems at the frontiers of physics, materials science and engineering.