New Publication in “Crystal Growth & Design”

Fabrication of nanocrystals from their disordered solid-state precursors represents a new synthetic strategy. Herein, we report a rapid-heating-triggered in situ solid-state crystal growth method capable of transforming amorphous TiO2 nanotubes into anatase nanocrystals with well-defined facets and uniform sizes within a minute. …

New Publication in “Physical Review B”

Magnetic exchange coupling behavior was investigated in MnBi/FeCo bilayer system at the hard/soft magnetic interface. We performed a combined study of cross-sectional high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM), DFT calculations, and micromagnetic simulations to elucidate effect of interface structure on exchange coupling. …

New Publication in “AIP Advance”

An extended phenomenological model is proposed to rationalize the potential barriers of the varistor like boundaries of piezoelectric semiconductors. This model takes self-consistently into account the inverse piezoelectric effect of the internal electric field associated with the barrier height at grain boundaries. …

New Publication in “Archive of Applied Mechanics”

A state-of-the-art approach is used for the ferroelectric layer. The material behavior of the ferromagnetic layer is described by a continuum formulation from the literature, which is discretized using a newly proposed approach for the consistent interpolation of the magnetization vector. …

New Publication in “Chemistry Select”

Developing TiO2 crystals with specific morphologies and nanostructured architectures is highly desirable in energy storage, conversion and catalysis applications. Herein, we report a close correlation between mechanical strength of the TiO2 precursors and their different crystallization pathways. …

New Publication in “Nature Communications”

Any dielectric material under a strain gradient presents flexoelectricity. Here, we synthesized 0.75 sodium bismuth titanate −0.25 strontium titanate (NBT-25ST) core–shell nanoparticles and observed domain-like nanoregions (DLNRs) up to an extreme temperature of 800 °C. …

New Publication in “Acta Materialia”

The focus of this study is the distribution of surface-induced bulk stresses in a LiCoO2 nanoparticle and their impact on the migration of Li-vacancies. At these length scales, surface effects gain an appreciable impact not only on the electrochemical and mechanical behavior of the electrode material, but also on defect thermodynamics. …

New Publication in “Physical Review Applied”

In this work we study the impact of internal bias fields on the electrocaloric effect (ECE), utilizing an analytical model and ab-initio-based molecular dynamics simulations. We reveal the complex dependency of the ECE on field protocol and relative strength of internal and external fields. …

New Publication in “Energy Technology”

We discuss and analyze the occurrence of the inverse (or negative) electrocaloric effect, where the isothermal application of an electric field leads to an increase in entropy and the removal of the field decreases the entropy of the system under consideration. We show that in all these cases the inverse electrocaloric effect is related to the presence of competing phases or states which are close in energy and can easily be transformed with the applied field. …

New Publication in “Energy Technology”

the highest electrocaloric effect is observed in poled hard PZT with the field applied along the poling direction, which is related to the reduced hysteresis losses caused by internal electric fields associated with defect complexes. The weak hysteretic dependency of polarization as function of the electric field in hard PZT also allows inducing an inverse electrocaloric effect. …