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 of m...
Jul 16, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 15
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 ....
Jul 10, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 14
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 efficienci...
Jul 01, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 13
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 liquid h...
Jun 16, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 12
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. T...
Jun 16, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 11
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 to...
May 29, 2025•7 min•Season 7Ep. 10
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 allo...
May 19, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 9
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 a ...
May 12, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 8
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 gain...
May 09, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 7
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 team s...
Mar 24, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 6
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 attach...
Mar 18, 2025•6 min•Season 7Ep. 5
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, where h...
Mar 04, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 4
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 development...
Feb 11, 2025•4 min•Season 7Ep. 3
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 tran...
Feb 03, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 2
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 ....
Jan 15, 2025•5 min•Season 7Ep. 1
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 crystalli...
Nov 18, 2024•6 min•Season 6Ep. 23
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 manufacturing p...
Nov 15, 2024•4 min•Season 6Ep. 22
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 helica...
Nov 11, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 21
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Yen-Hung Lin of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology about his work to eliminate defects in perovskite solar cells. Lin’s group treated the perovskites with a category of molecules known as amino-silanes, which bind vacancies in the perovskites, preventing recombination of the electrons and holes. The amino-silane treatment retained the device’s performance at 95% power conversion efficiency for more than 1500 hours. This w...
Oct 15, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 20
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Michael Pettes, deputy group leader and staff scientist at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies in Los Alamos National laboratory about a characterization technique that employs a four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscope (4D-STEM) paired with complex computational data analysis to directly measure the thermal expansion coefficient (TEC) of monolayer epitaxial tungsten diselenide. The standard technique for dire...
Oct 10, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 19
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Michael Dickey of North Carolina State University about the discovery and mechanical properties of glassy gels. Dicky credits his postdoc Meixiang Wang who, while studying ionic liquids, created the first glassy gel. Dicky’s group found that the mechanical properties of their glassy gel include shape memory, self-healing, and adhesion. While other materials may demonstrate comparable toughness and stretchiness, the glassy gel offers ...
Aug 16, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 18
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Coskun Kocabas from The University of Manchester in the UK about his development of a metamaterial that can tailor thermal emission. Rather than using a periodic system, which most topological materials employ, his research team borrowed a concept from laser design and created an optical cavity using a dielectric medium sandwiched between two layers that act as mirrors: a metal substrate and a top layer of platinum. The top layer serv...
Aug 12, 2024•3 min•Season 6Ep. 17
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Rasmus Neilsen from the Technical University of Denmark about his fabrication of a monolithic selenium/silicon tandem solar cell. The selenium forms the top cell of the tandem device, with silicon used as the bottom cell. Selenium-based single-junction solar cells have traditionally used fluorine-doped tin oxide. In this work indium-tin oxide was used as a transparent conductive layer that is easier to deposit and its use is more wide...
Aug 06, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 16
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Mihir Pendharkar of Stanford University about characterizing electronic properties of twistronics materials. Twistronics refers to a type of electronic device consisting of two-dimensional materials layered at a relative twist angle, forming a new periodic structure known as moiré superlattices. Pendharkar and colleagues studied different configurations of graphene layered with hexagonal boron nitride. Determining the twist angle of ...
Jun 25, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 15
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Falon Kalutantirige from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign and Ying Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison about their approach and discovery when characterizing nanovoids in polymer films. Using polyamide (PA) membranes as their subject of study, the researchers applied graph theory combined with electron tomography and molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the morphology of the nanovoids. The key to understa...
Jun 18, 2024•6 min•Season 6Ep. 14
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Alexandre Dmitriev from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden about his group’s computational model of a three-dimensional metamaterial exhibiting a magnetoelectric effect—known as the Tellegen effect—when exposed to light. The building blocks of the metamaterial are comprised of disks of silicon, 150 nm in diameter, supporting a cylinder of cobalt. Silicon is chosen for its high refractive index and cobalt for its magnetic properties....
Jun 13, 2024•6 min•Season 6Ep. 13
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Antonio Dominguez-Alfaro from the University of Cambridge, UK about the development of a single-step manufacturing approach for a multimaterial 3D-printing method. The research team created two inks. One ink is a polymeric deep eutectic solvent – polyDES – made by combining and heating two salts to form a deep eutectic monomer and adding a photo-initiator to allow the ink to be cured. This ink is an ionic conductor so can capture sign...
Apr 20, 2024•5 min•Season 6Ep. 12
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Elizabeth Wilson interviews postdoctoral researcher M. Iqbal Bakti Utama of Northwestern University about a method allowing single photon production without defect. Aryl diazonium chemistry has been used in the past to functionalize the surface of carbon nanotubes. Utama’s group found that this chemistry also works for tungsten diselenide surfaces. The group immersed tungsten diselenide monolayers into an aqueous solution of 4-nitrobenzene-diazonium tetraf...
Apr 09, 2024•6 min•Season 6Ep. 11
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Sophia Chen interviews Irmgard Bischofberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about her investigation of how chirality emerges in nature. She uses liquid crystal molecules of disodium chromoglycate in her studies. When the molecules are dissolved in water, they form linear rods. The research group then forces the rods through a microfluidic cell, causing the rods to assemble into spiral structures without mirror symmetry. The achiral structure ...
Apr 04, 2024•4 min•Season 6Ep. 10
In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Eric Pop, Xiangjin Wu, and Asir Intisar Khan from Stanford University about their work building a phase-change memory superlattice at the nanoscale. They created the superlattice by alternating layers of antimony-tellurium nanoclusters with a nanocomposite made from germanium, antimony, and tellurium (GST467). Each layer is ~2 nm thick and the superlattice consists of 15 periods of these alternating layers. The microstructural propert...
Mar 26, 2024•9 min•Season 6Ep. 9
