Four-Year College Faculty-Student Team Fellowships Program
In summer 2017, the following faculty/student teams joined the MRSEC group:
Prof. Abebe Kebede and students Harrison Rivers and Myles Neloms, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
worked with Xia Hong, Physics.
Recent experiments have shown that thin films of the form M1-xRxNiO3 (where M = Sm and R = rare earth) grown on different substrates demonstrate a variety of transport and magnetic properties, including strain-driven metal insulator transition and antiferromagnetism. Most measurements of this class of materials are done on films prepared from commercially available targets, but these targets have impurity levels high enough to distort the experimental results. There is need for ultra-pure materials for basic and industrial research. In this work, several batches of materials were prepared under a variety of processing conditions, including sintering and annealing temperatures, and fast and slow warming and cooling profiles. During the summer of 2017, the team from NCAT prepared these materials and performed powder x-ray diffraction measurements for structural and phase analysis. The preliminary results indicate that several days of sintering at 900-1000oC and repeated grinding and annealing can lead to relatively secondary-phase-free materials.
Prof. Hasitha Mahabaduge and student Nowsherwan Sultan, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, GA
worked with Shireen Adenwalla, Physics.
Hasitha Mahabaduge and Nowsherwan Sultan worked on ferroelectric tunnel junctions, investigating the effect of oligmer vinylidene fluoride thickness on tunnel electroresistance. Organic ferroelectrics such as oligmer vinylidene fluoride could open up the practical applications of ferroelectric tunnel junctions to silicon technology, large-area applications and flexible electronics. The team also studied the magnetic anisotropy in Pt/Co/MgO/Pt films with different annealing conditions and rapid thermal processing. These projects involve characterizing the thin film structures using x-ray diffraction, MOKE (Magneto Optical Kerr Effect), and pyroelectric measurements.
Professor Carolina Ilie and students Ian Evans and Ben Swanson
State University New York, Oswego, NY
worked with Peter Dowben, Physics
The team from SUNY-Oswego studied printable perovskite thin films, which may be used to manufacture cheaper, more efficient solar cells. Ben Swanson performed electric transport measurement capacitance profiling, and Ian Evans analyzed X-ray photoemission spectra. In addition, Ian’s theoretical project consists in modeling and simulations of graphene nanoribbons – length and width variations of molecular orbitals, as well as optimal edge binding sites for gold particles.