September 18, 2023
Our group recently published new papers investigating atomic dynamics in two exciting classes of materials!
Our work on the superionic silver argyrodite Ag8SnSe6 revealed its extreme phonon anharmonicity, which accounts for the ultralow thermal conductivity (of interest for thermoelectrics) and fast ion conduction (of interest for solid-state electrolytes). Our group led the computational modeling. This was a great collaboration with the group of former postdoc Jie Ma, now Professor at Shanghai Jiao-Tong university! Check out the paper and accompanying News & Views article here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01560-x
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01605-1
Our work on the ultrafast photoinduced insulator-to-metal transition in VO2, a leading condidate for neuromorphic computing devices as well as 'smart windows', revealed the complex nature of electron-phonon interactions in the photo-excited transition. This was a great collaboration with researchers at Stanford and SLAC. Read more here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-023-02118-z