Compositional complexity is found to strongly affect electrical, thermal, and magnetic properties of nickel-containing face-centered cubic concentrated alloys.
Compared to pure nickel, tuning chemical composition in binary alloys has altered migration barriers of defects, and significantly affected defect dynamics under ion irradiation.
The detection of local phase transitions remains challenging, and to date most techniques can detect properties that change at macroscopic scales or at atomic scales, but virtually no technique offers the ability to monitor and map bias-induced phase trans
Researchers demonstrated that straining the crystal lattice of strontium cobaltite reduces oxygen content even under highly oxidizing conditions, enabling formation of functional oxygen defects at lower temperatures than previously possible.
Giant elastic tunability—the Young’s modulus changes reversibly over 30% under applied electric fields—was discovered in BiFeO3 epitaxial thin films through an atomic force microscopy study utilizing band-excitation piezroresponse spectroscopy.
Multiferroic materials are important because their electrical and magnetic properties are coupled. Because BiFeO3 magnetically orders below 640 K, it is one of two known room-temperature multiferroic materials.
Contradicting theoretical expectations, researchers discovered that increased molecular weight of a polymer significantly reduces the influence of nanoparticles on macroscopic properties of polymer nanocomposite.