Nature produces soft materials with fascinating combinations of mechanical properties. For example, the mussel byssus embodies a combination of stiffness and toughness, a feature that is unmatched by synthetic hydrogels. Key to enabling these excellent mec ...
Polymer-derived ceramics (PDCs) are a very attractive class of materials due to their excellent properties such as resistance to high temperatures and harsh environments, adjustability of mechanical and functional behavior, and compatibility with a broad r ...
Mechanical resonators are widely used in sensors, transducers and optomechanical systems, where mechanical dissipation sets the ultimate limit to performance. Over the past 15 years, the quality factors in strained mechanical resonators have increased by f ...
Which phenomenon slows down the dynamics in supercooled liquids and turns them into glasses is a long-standing question of condensed matter. Most popular theories posit that as the temperature decreases, many events must occur in a coordinated fashion on a ...
Hybrid methylammonium (MA) lead halide perovskites have emerged as materials exhibiting excellent photovoltaic performance related to their rich structural and dynamic properties. Here, we use multifrequency (X-, Q-, and W-band) electron paramagnetic reson ...
Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations and field-theory arguments, we study the fully frustrated transversefield Ising model on the square lattice for the purpose of quantitatively relating two different order parameters to each other. We consider a "primar ...
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is one of the premier methods to synthesize ultra-thin materials on complex surfaces. The technique allows for precise control of the thickness down to single atomic layers, while at the same time providing uniform coverage ev ...
Macrocycles provide an attractive modality for drug development but the identification of ligands to targets of interest is hindered by the lack of large macrocyclic compound libraries for high-throughput screening. A strategy to efficiently synthesize lar ...
Barocaloric (BC) materials provide cheaper and more energy efficient alternatives to traditional refrigerants. Some liquid alkanes were recently shown to exhibit a colossal BC effect, matching the entropy changes in commercial vapour-liquid refrigerants. D ...
The subject of the present work is discovery and in-depth characterization of a new class of functional materials. Tuning of the bond polarity and orbital occupation with a goal of establishing balance between localization and delocalization of electrons - ...
In the third study, the order-disorder phase transition of single-crystal C60 is studied using time-resolved electron microscopy. Solid C60 undergoes a first-order phase transition upon heating to 260 K. This is a structural transition from the low-tempera ...
