Seminar Speaker: Laurent Bellaiche, University of Arkansas

Designing New Materials and Phenomena From Ab-Initio Approaches

Abstract

The aim of this talk is to report some predictions in a variety of materials arising from the use of first-principle and first-principle-based numerical approaches. More precisely, three different topics will be discussed in detail: a design of multifunctional materials having several optimized physical properties, including strong piezoelectricity, large electro-optic conversion, as well as, ultrahigh energy density and efficiency, a proposed design to induce the elusive quantum spin liquid state in 2D magnets, the prediction that relaxor ferroelectrics can exhibit a variety of so-called hidden states (i.e., states that are not accessible via the tuning of thermodynamic variables, such as temperature or pressure) with enhanced properties, and are promising for ultrafast neuromorphic computing, when applying THz pulses of electric fields.

Biography

Laurent Bellaiche is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and in the Institute for Nanoscience and Engineering at the University of Arkansas. He is also the Twenty-First Century Endowed Professor in Optics, Nanoscience and Science Education at the University of Arkansas since July 2006, and a Scientific Associate Investigator of the Australian FLEET center (ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies) since 2019.

His group has co-authored over 400 refereed journal articles, including 84 in Physical Review Letters, 37 in Nature journals, 2 in Science journals, 1 in Reviews of Modern Physics, 1 in PNAS, 19 in Advanced Materials journals and 3 in Nano Letters. These publications have been quoted about 23,000 times, with a corresponding h-index of 79 as of June 22, 2023.

He received the Ralph Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from ORAU in 1999, the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (2000), and the Alumni Association’s 2009 Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award in Research. He has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2011, and of the Arkansas Research Alliance (ARA) in 2017. He was named an SEC Faculty Achievement Award recipient in 2019 and received the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) from the Department of Defense in 2020.