and Department of Materials Science and Engineering
MIT
Abstract:
Strain Engineering uses strain to guide the interactions of material structures with electrons, photons, etc. and control energy, mass and information flows. The success of Strained Silicon technology today harbingers what Strain Engineering may do for human civilization in the future, with potential breakthroughs in electronics, photonics, ferroics, superconductivity, catalysis, sensing, etc. In this talk I will give examples of exploiting the strain design space of low-dimensional materials. Homogenous and inhomogeneous elastic strain, bending, interlayer twist and slip lead to tunable, low-energy artificial atoms, artificial superlattices and pseudoheterostructures that can regulate quasiparticle motion. Strain also governs ferroelastic and band topology transitions in these materials. Lastly, we demonstrate production of kilogram-scale nanowires under large tensile elastic strain, that leads to improved superconductivity. By controlling the strain tensor and strain gradient statically or dynamically, one opens up a much larger parameter space - on par with alloying - for optimizing the functional properties of materials, which imparts a new meaning to Feynman’s statement “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
Bio:
Ju Li has held faculty positions at the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and is presently a chaired professor at MIT. His group (http://Li.mit.edu) works on energy materials and systems. Ju is a recipient of the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the 2006 Materials Research Society Outstanding Young Investigator Award, and the TR35 award from Technological Review. Ju was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society in 2017 and a Fellow of AAAS in 2020. In 2016 Ju Li co-founded one of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Low-Carbon Energy Centers, the Center for Materials in Energy and Extreme Environments (CME). Li is the chief organizer of MIT A+B Applied Energy Symposia that aim to develop solutions to global climate change challenges with "A-Action before 2040" and "B-Beyond 2040 technologies ( http://li.mit.edu/ab/20http://li.mit.edu/ab/19)
All faculty, researchers and graduate students are invited to attend
