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Materials News podcast by MRS Bulletin provides breakthrough news & interviews with researchers on hot topics including biomaterials, quantum materials, artificial intelligence, sustainability, perovskites, and robotics. Produced by the Materials Research Society.
119 Episodes
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In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Sathvik Iyengar, a PhD candidate at Rice University, about the development of a hybrid material called “glaphene.” A hybrid of graphene and two-dimensional (2D) silica glass, glaphene is a semiconductor with a bandgap of ~4 eV. More importantly, Iyengar and colleagues introduce a new method of bandgap engineering using hybrid materials instead of doping, which opens new possibilities for producing electronic components. This work w...
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Victor Lopez-Richard from Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil about his memory device called a mem-emitter. Unlike a memresistor (short for “memory resistor”), which made of materials whose electrical resistance can be tuned, the mem-emitter is used to tune optical properties. Experimentally, Lopez-Richard’s research group made the device out of molybdenum diselenide, which is a transition metal dichalcogenide, that was the...
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Ashley Bucsek from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor about her laboratory-scale three-dimensional (3D) x-ray diffraction (XRD) microscope to replace studies done in synchrotron facilities. A key element of the design is the material used to make the x-rays. Instead of using a solid metal as a target, Bucsek’s research group used a liquid metal source to generate the x-rays, thereby circumventing melting. Among the advantages o...
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Daniel Garcia-Gonzalez from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in Spain about his research group’s reprogrammable metamaterial. The researchers use a soft polymer, mixed with magnetic particles. By rotating the orientation of the magnets, they tune the softness or compressibility of the material. This work was published in a recent issue of Advanced Materials.
To enable future lunar settlements, researchers are pursuing ways to construct needed devices on the moon to save the expense of shipping them from Earth. In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Felix Lang from the University of Potsdam, Germany about his group’s development of perovskite solar cells that utilize the moon’s regolith for the substrate. The researchers achieved power conversion efficiency of ~10%, with some device architectures leading to improved efficien...
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Sheng Xu from Tohoku University, Japan about his lightweight shape memory alloy that retains superelasticity at temperatures as cold as 4 K and as hot as 400°C. This range is about 5 times wider than commercial shape memory alloys. Shape memory alloys are needed for extreme environments such as part of machines in space or deep sea. Xu also sees uses for biomedical applications or for storage containers for liquid fuels like liqui...
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Hang Zhang from Aalto University in Finland about his group’s creation of a composite material that is both stiff and self-healing. The composite involves a hydrogel where the long polymer chains are confined between nanosheets of synthetic hectorite. This material mimics skin that is both stiff and self-healing. Applications may be forthcoming in self-healing soft robots or artificial tissues that can self-heal like synthetic skin...
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 niobate lead titanate—exhibited excellent properties down to 25–30 nm thick before they would start...
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. However, alloys of these materials are ferroelectric. When the researchers stacked the ferroelectric a...
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 a single sheet of silicon nitride, fastening it to the support frame. They tested its behavior in...
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 order to optimize the materials properties. While the three-dimensional imaging is critical to g...
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. They looked specifically at the self-assembly of gold nanocubes into a lattice structure. Ye’s tea...
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 made of a 500 μm silicone elastomer layer and an electrode made from indium tin oxide. This is atta...
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 machine learning. Researchers describe the atoms’ collective interactions as a quantity of energy, wher...
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 control the material’s electronic behavior, researchers can pursue new materials for the developme...
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, Bae and colleagues used a material that compresses in thickness. That is, the window becomes more t...
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 current collection. This work was published in a recent issue of Advanced Materials.
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 materials such as shells, their research group took a multidisciplinary approach to control crysta...
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 fabricate the material, Moini’s research team used a two-component robotic additive manufacturin...
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 teeth. The researchers stacked round discs of aluminum oxide particles in horizontal layers in a hel...
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